298 Quotes About Complexity

If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.

I never knew anybody . . . who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details.

We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole.

We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex.

Simplicity is a bliss that makes one comprehend.

The usual duty of the “intellectual” is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, it was already clear that, chemically speaking, you and I are not much different from cans of soup. And yet we can do many complex and even fun things we do not usually see cans of soup doing.

They forget that human beings, while whining after the simple life, thrive on complexity.