#Complexity Quotes

“Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake- its everything except what it is! (Act 1, scene 1)”

“This knot of nature is so well tied that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends.”

“It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.”

“It is as easy to count atomies as to resolve the propositions of a lover.”

“Under every deep a lower deep opens.”

“The simplicity of the universe is very different from the simplicity of a machine. The simplicity of nature is not that which may be easily read but is inexhaustible. The last analysis can no wise be made.”

“Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

“You think because you understand 'one' you must also understand 'two', because one and one make two. But you must also understand 'and'.”

“And what a plan! This vast operation is undoubtedly the most complicated and difficult that has ever occurred.”

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

“The world, nature, human beings, do not move like machines. The edges are never clear-cut, but always frayed. Nature never draws a line without smudging it.”

“The ordinary literary man, even though he be an eminent historian, is ill-fitted to be a mentor in affairs of government. For...things are for the most part very simple in books, and in practical life very complex.”

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

“The minute a thing is long and complicated, it confuses. Whoever wrote the Ten Commandments made 'em short. They may not always be kept, but they are understood.”

“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.”

“There are two things I don't care how smart you are, you will never understand. One is an alienist's testimony, and the other is a railroad timetable.”

“Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge. Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words when short are best of all.”

“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”

“Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge”

“Just read the farm relief bill. It's just a political version of Einstein's last theory. If a farmer could understand it, he certainly would know more than to farm. He would be a professor at Harvard.”

“Everytime a lawyer writes something, he is not writing for posterity, he is writing something so that endless others of his craft can make a living out of trying to figure out what he said. Course perhaps he really haden't said anything, that's what makes it so hard to explain.”

“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.”

“All the stream that's roaring byCame out of a needle's eye.”

“The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.”

“The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.”

“It is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and something in our sweetheart that we dislike.”

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

“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 attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments.”

“One always begins with the simple, then comes the complex, and by superior enlightenment one often reverts in the end to the simple. Such is the course of human intelligence.”

“Twice Flush had done his utmost to kill his enemy; twice he had failed. And why had he failed, he asked himself? Because he loved Miss Barrett. Looking up at her from under his eyebrows as she lay, severe and silent on the sofa, he knew that he must love her for ever. Things are not simple but complex. If he bit Mr. Browning he bit her too. Hatred is not hatred; hatred is also love.”

“...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.”

“I keep going back to love when I write songs because I can't figure it out.”

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

“Algebra applies to the clouds.”

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

“I am large, I contain multitudes”

“You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.”

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

“For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together”

“For nothing was simply one thing.”

“Phenomena intersect; to see but one is to see nothing.”

“This duo inside of me causes the perfect opportunity to live and learn twice as fast as those who choose to accept simplicity.”

“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.”

“A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.”

“Darling I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream.”

“All that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities.”

“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.”

“Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.”

“The income tax has spawned an intrusive bureaucracy, creating so much complexity and red tape that millions of ordinary citizens have to go get some accountant to fill out the forms for them - and then sign under penalty of perjury that it was done right. If you knew how to do it right, you wouldn't have to go to somebody else to have it done, would you?”