Quotes about Complexity

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

But my main debt, which may not be evident, was to Hemingway; it was he who showed us all how much tension and complexity unalloyed dialogue can convey, and how much poetry lurks in the simplest nouns and predicates.

The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

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

The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections

There is some good in the worst of us, and some evil in the best of us.

Truth is more important, freedom is more complex, and Jesus is more liberating than you think.

Any detail can be magnified to reveal even more detail ad infinitum. The technical term is "infinite complexity." Fractals are the theological equivalent of what theologians call the incomprehensibility of God. Just when we think we have God figured out, we discover a new dimension of His kaleidoscopic personality.

We give people political labels, sexual labels, and religious labels. But in the process, we strip them of their individuality and complexity. Prejudice is pre-judging. It's assuming that bad stories end badly, but Jesus is in the business of turning bad beginnings into happily ever afters. ... God cannot give up on you. It's not in His nature. His goodness and mercy will follow you all the days of your life. All you have to do is turn around. All you have to do is crash the party!

If your personal genome sequence was written out longhand, it would be a three-billion-word book. The King James Version of the Bible has 783,137 words, so your genetic code is the equivalent of nearly four thousand Bibles. And if your personal genome sequence were an audio book and you were read at a rate of one double helix per second, it would take nearly a century to put you into words!

Maybe faith has less to do with gaining knowledge and more to do with causing wonder. Maybe a relationship with God doesn't simplify your lives. Maybe it complicates our lives in ways that they should be complicated.

One might as well attempt to calculate mathematically the contingent forms of the tinkling bits of glass in a kaleidoscope as to look through the tube of the future and foretell its pattern.