Quotes about Complexity

No ideology or psychological theory can possibly do justice to the full range of human experience.

Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.

With copious evidence ranging from Plato's haughtiness to Beethoven's tirades, we may conclude that the most brilliant people of history tend to be a prickly lot.

Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers.

People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.

Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole.

We paint a slow picture. You can see the brushstrokes. We don't get to the point, and sometimes when we do, our readers don't notice, in fact. It's so couched in nuance, it can fly right over a person's head. 'What was that you said? I couldn't quite make it out.'

I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules.

Iife/personality must be taken as a total entity. All of your life is all of your life, and no one incident stands alone.

Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

I try not to stack the deck unduly but always let doubt and darkness have their say along with faith and hope, not just because it is good apologetics - woe to him who tries to make it look simple and easy - but because to do it any other way would be to be less true to the elements of doubt and darkness that exist in myself no less than in others.