Complexity Quotes

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can't make head nor tail out of it.

It was evident however that the lawyers would have to have their say....This also opened up a vista both lengthy and obscure.

Each generation supposes that the world was simpler for the one before it.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

There is no accounting for human beings.

Congress is hard to deal with, dealing with, you know, multiple parliaments and commissions and unions and this and that and the other, that's very complicated.

I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules.

I never feel the need to go out and make some grand statement that I'm dark and twisty and complicated, because I'm not that either. It's just not as simple as ponies and rainbows, though I do love ponies and rainbows.

It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse.

I didn't have a perfect model, but I wanted to try to blend my own personal reflections and experiences with this broader canvas to see how a lot of the narratives we have about economy and foreign policy got stuck. Because we have these categories of liberal, conservative, free marketer, open government - all these stereotypes about our politics and the categories we try to put things in are inadequate to this sort of complex, ambiguous, sometimes contradictory experience we have as ordinary people and that I have as an elected official.

There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.

It is a very hard and troublesome thing to dispose of whole, half, and quarter-mistakes; to sift them and assign the portion of truth to its proper place.

I regularly read Internet user groups filled with messages from people trying to solve software incompatibility problems that, in terms of complexity, make the U.S. Tax Code look like Dr. Seuss.

Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate.

I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.

The small wisdom is like water in a glass: clear, transparent, pure. The great wisdom is like the water in the sea: dark, mysterious, impenetrable.

Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.

Darling I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream.

Algebra applies to the clouds.

Women have so many levels. There's the physical level, which is a lot of fun. There's this emotional level, which is extremely mercurial.

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity. To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.

These are the days of lasers in the jungle, staccato signals of constant information.

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.

Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.

Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.

There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.

The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words which are clear; the great truth has great silence.

As a taxpayer, you are required to be fully in compliance with the United States Tax Code, which is currently the size and weight of the Budweiser Clydesdales.

The first effect of the mind growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed in a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive "condensation" of thought. ... Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics is such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard ... Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Méchanique Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words "it is evident," he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him.

When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it's really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people stop... But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem - and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works.

War is an art and as such is not susceptible of explanation by fixed formula

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there.

Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.

Imagination could never invent the number of different contradictions that exist innately in each person's heart.

Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

I'm so many people. They shock me sometimes. I wish I was just me! I used to think I was going crazy, until I discovered that some people I admired were like that to.

The more clever and cunning people are, the stranger the events will be.

It is necessary, in order to know things well, to know the particulars of them; and these, being infinite, make our knowledge eversuperficial and imperfect.

All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it

Everything is simpler than one can imagine, and yet complicated and inter-twined beyond comprehension.

The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now— James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too.

To be a woman is something so strange, so confusing and so complicated that only a woman could put up with it.

True success has more components than one sentence or idea can contain.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

...she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstacy in the air. Where to begin?--that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must run; the mark made.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.

Simplicity is a delicate imposition.

Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it's on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you've got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration.

Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest.

Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all verbs are irregular.

It's because I like you, I don't want to be with you. It's a complicated emotion.

Miles: Well, things are kind of complicated right now. When you’re a grown-up, you’ll understand. Jonah: I don’t want to be a grown-up. Miles: Why not? Jonah: Because grown-ups always say that things are complicated.

The underlying, primary psychic reality is so inconceivably complex that it can be grasped only at the farthest reach of intuition, and then but very dimly. That is why it needs symbols.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

We must never forget that human motives are generally far more complicated than we are apt to suppose, and that we can very rarely accurately describe the motives of another.

Nothing is black or white.

A songwriter's supreme challenge is being complex and simple at the same time