Complexity Quotes

“It was odds on they would find out one of the team had escaped the blast, and it wouldn’t be long before they knew which one. Then they would come looking for him.
And Conor intended they should find him.”
― Michael Parker, The Eagle's Covenant

“Once we acknowledge the complex nature of the world, the notion of dissecting and reassembling entire industry constituents like Lego is illusory.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“To make things even more challenging, cells must also be able to make all of their component molecular machines using only the resources that are available in the local environment. Think of the magnitude of this accomplishment. Many bacteria are able to build all of their own molecules from the a few simple raw materials like carbon dioxide, oxygen, and ammonia. A single bacterial cell knows how to build several thousand types of proteins, including motors, girders, toxins, catalysts, and construction machinery. This cell also builds hundreds of RNA molecules with different orderings of nucleotides, as well as a diverse collection of lipids, sugar polymers, and a bewildering collection of exotic small molecules. All of these different molecules must be created from scratch, using only the molecules that the cell eats, drinks, and breathes.”
― David S. Goodsell, The Machinery of Life

“I'm gonna be really real with you. People are a fucking mess. We love to complicate simple shit, and simplify complicated shit. Sometimes, we get so caught up in trying to follow the rules that we forget to question whether or not the rules make sense. What works for Miles and Shante won't necessarily work for you, just like what works for Mom and Dad doesn't work for me. Remember what I said about being honest.”
― James Ramos, Daniel, Deconstructed

“Maybe at the end of our lives we get a Ferris-Wheel vantage of the whole tapestry, the quilt laid flat, answering for its complexity. At the beginning we’re handed frayed and stained flowery bed sheets, a scrap of polka-dots, a snatch of strawberry print. Tattered as they are, there’s some sustaining sweetness in there.

The oldest pioneer quilts conceal bits of paper batting between their threadbare layers: postcards, recipes, clipped snippets of newspaper poetry. Every spare material had a part to play, fragments of experience and feeling arranged in a repeating pattern, little sewn sound bytes spinning ordered fractals.”
― Robin Brown, Glitter Saints: The Cosmic Art of Forgiveness, a Memoir

“No life is easy until one makes “easiness” a way of life.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it's still a ball of string full of knots. Nobody should mind.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

“The grand, tarnished panorama of History amounts, as I see it, to a flow of interpretations, a confused consensus of unreliable eyewitness accounts. The novelist is all of us, and we narrate whenever we see, because seeing is complex like everything.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“In the chaotic rage that fuels my soul, there is a relaxing calm that rises without warning.”
― Dark Night Beacon

“It was as if he took the complexity of human beings as a personal affront, the maddening inconsistency of human beings, their contradictions which they made no attempt to wipe out or reconcile, their mixture of idealism and concupiscence, grandeur and pettiness, truth and lies. They were not to be taken seriously any more than a cockroach deserves serious consideration.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.”
― Alan Perlis

“The significance of free speech extends beyond individual liberties; it serves as a guardian of truth and a catalyst for societal introspection. By allowing dissenting opinions to flourish, we invite the crucible of debate to forge a refined understanding of complex issues. This unfettered exchange of ideas challenges the status quo, prevents the entrenchment of dogma, and empowers societies to adapt and evolve in the face of ever-changing circumstances.”
― James William Steven Parker

“A metacrisis is a complex system whose elements are crises, and exhibits, as a unified whole, its own unique behaviors and properties beyond those found in its elemental crises.”
― Evan Tabak Atlas

“The solution of a problem lies within the problem itself. One must thoroughly understand and think on the nature of the problem in order to get ideas for solutions”
― Sheikh Muhammad Ibraheem

“Choosing a partner mainly for sex, without having much of a personal relationship, is like playing tiddly-winks instead of chess — because friendship is what provides any relationship with its complexity, substance, subtlety, sustainability and enjoyment.”
― George Hammond

“I’m setting myself up for a life of ease and enjoyment. Being human is complex enough in itself. I want to truly immerse myself in the beauties of life.”
― Robin S. Baker

“Cuanto más complejo sea lo que queremos aprehender, más importante es tener distintos pares de ojos, para que esos haces de luz converjan y podamos ver lo Uno a través de lo múltiple. Esa es la naturaleza de una verdadera visión: une los puntos de vista ya conocidos y muestra otros que se ignoraban hasta entonces, permitiendo que entendamos que todos son, de hecho, parte de lo mismo”
― Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World

“Chris’ response to Dick’s video, though she does not articulate it at the time, is complex. As an artist she finds Dick’s work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realize that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre’s attraction to Rochester, a mean horsefaced junky: bad characters invite invention.) But Chris keeps these thoughts to herself. Because she does not express herself in theoretical language, no one expects too much from her and she is used to tripping out on layers of complexity in total silence.”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“There was no church, no philosophy, no school of thought, no nothing that could be trusted in full. To believe too much in anything was to sacrifice your faculties. The only way forward was to embrace the tussle of it all.

Born with a seething righteousness, Vern looked down on anyone les willing or able to put up a fight than she was.”
― Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland

“Everything is complex for those who think, and no doubt thought itself takes delight in making things yet more complex.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Life is a ball of yarn that someone got all tangled. It would make sense if it were rolled up tight, or if it were unrolled and completely stretched out. But such as it is, life is a problem without shape, a confusion of yarn leading nowhere.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Among the sensations that inwardly torture us to the point of becoming pleasurable, the disquiet provoked by the world's mystery is one of the most common and complex.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Strategy is everything (but not everything is strategy). Strategy is everyone (so get everyone on the same strategic page).”
― Max McKeown, The Strategy Book

“Simple problems are the hardest to solve because they require common sense—something not so common. Beneath every simple problem lies a complex one trying to wiggle out.”
― Abraham Varghese

“Why isn't my profile correct?"

"Why should it be?" asks Kiki. "Why should it ever have been correct? Regardless of how complex a simulation is, the reality is always more complex.”
― Marc-Uwe Kling, QualityLand

“There is more to me than meets the eye. Stop trying to figure me out. I am beyond your understanding. I don't want to be known.”
― Dark Night Beacon

“Joyously solve and stay pure with resolve.”
― J.S. Mason

“Are people not a little more complex than that? And are revolutionaries devoid of personal feelings and emotions? Do they never fall in love, or enjoy beauty?”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“People associate science with absolutes that are immutable, when in fact science is a process that continually uncovers new information. As new information evolves, the process of science allows for self-correction. The biological or health sciences are different from the physical sciences and mathematics. With mathematics, two plus two equals four today, and two plus two will equal four a thousand years from now. Not so with the biological sciences, where what we know continues to evolve and uncertainty is common. This uncertainty is magnified in the context of a deadly pandemic when there is already anxiety and suffering. With COVID, our understanding of transmissibility, severity, vulnerability of different people, and level of protection, to name a few, continually evolved, and our medical advice had to change to reflect this.
This is exactly what happened in early March with the question of whether to wear masks and how effective they were.”
― Anthony Fauci, On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

“It is impossible that any (incredibly highly complex) universe would be, or can be, created by pure chance. If any chance is involved, then this is a chance of higher order and functioning under the ultimate laws of the Being. But this chance (as we understand the word chance and use it) is zero because “chance” gives a chance to the possibility (probability). The chance is the creation itself (the moment of creation) and is not random. Chance is responsible more for improbability than for securing probability because the driving force ("engine") of existence is not a chance; it is not evolution per se but the potential activated through evolution and not caused or created by evolution. Evolution manifests degrees of existing potential (Being, Absolute Mind). (This potential is the infinity of probabilities [which excludes improbability because if there were improbability, there would be no infinity].) We are all part of the paradoxical labyrinth (infinity) of the strange, mysterious being called the Absolute. Solving this biggest mystery of all helps us solve our own mystery of existence because the Absolute is one organism of which we are minuscule cells.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE