Quotes about Complexity

There are certain natures which cannot have love on one side without hatred on the other.

Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with a double focus. Facts form one of these, and ideas the other.

The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.

The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.)

Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literaly everything for me but a woman.

There is nothing harder to explain than humor.

You are going to love some of your characters because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason.

You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.

It is very difficult to evolve by altering the deep fabric of life; any change there is likely to be lethal. But fundamental change can be accomplished by the addition of new systems on top of old ones…Thus evolution by addition and the functional preservation of the preexisting structure must occur for one of two reasons-either the old function is required as well as the new one, or there is no way of bypassing the old system that is consistent with survival.

Some of science is very simple. When it gets complicated, that's usually because the world is complicated—or because we're complicated. When we shy away from it because it seems too difficult (or because we've been taught so poorly), we surrender the ability to take charge of our future. We are disenfranchised. Our self-confidence erodes.

We live in a complex age where many of the problems we face can, whatever their origins, only have solutions that involve a deep understanding of science and technology.

The fact that atoms are composed of three kinds of elementary particles—protons, neutrons and electrons—is a comparatively recent finding. The neutron was not discovered until 1932. Modern physics and chemistry have reduced the complexity of the sensible world to an astonishing simplicity: three units put together in various patterns make, essentially, everything.