Complexity Quotes

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

“Grown-ups always say that things are complicated.”

“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”

“In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.”

“There are sure to be two prescriptions diametrically opposite.”

“In political administration, no problem is ever simple. It can never be reduced to the question whether a certain measure is good or not.”

“All large political doctrines are rich in difficult problems - problems that are quite above the average citizen's reach. And that is not strange, since they are also above the reach of the ablest minds in the country; after all the fuss and all the talk, not one of those doctrines has been conclusively proven to be the right one and the best.”

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

“God made man simple, but how he changed and got complicated is hard to say.”

“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.”

“Everything is both simpler than we can imagine and more entangled than we can conceive.”

“Nature's way is simple and easy, but men prefer the intricate and artificial.”

“The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men---as well as his great moments of grand harmony---a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion---”

“When you look closely people are so strange & so complicated that they're actually beautiful.”

“Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you imagine”

“So, naturalists observe, a flea; Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum.”

“If you are describing any occurrence... make two or more distinct reports at different times... We discriminate at first only a few features, and we need to reconsider our experience from many points of view and in various moods in order to perceive the whole.”

“You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint "No Admittance" on my gate.”

“Love why do we one passion call,When 'tis a compound of them all?Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet,In all their equipages meet;Where pleasures mix'd with pains appear,Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear.”

“Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint - Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate. The fact of the matter is that most of the problems that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments, which do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past. - They deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men.”

“Every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.”

“To every complex question there is a simple answer and it is wrong.”

“Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.”

“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.”

“The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.”