Quotes about Complexity

I only look at her as a mother, and she doesn't succeed in being that to me.

Jesus was a rabbi, schooled by rabbis, who thought like rabbis. Rabbis, upon being asked a question by a disciple, usually answer with a paradoxical inquiry or a story. This can be annoying and time-consuming for those of us looking for neat, simple answers. But truth is too wild and complex to be contained in one answer, so Jesus often responded with a question or a parable.

I think life is perverse. It can be beautiful, but it won't.

I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.

I cannot imagine a more realistic faith than the Christian faith. At every turn, we are told we are death-determined creatures and that our lives, our all too brief lives, at the very least will be complex if not difficult.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Attempts at description are stupid. Who can all at once describe a human being? Even when he is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his appearance which must be completed by innumerable impressions under differing circumstances.

It's puzzling work, talking is.

Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.

so much subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which make a sort of blazonry or clock-face for it.

But in that curious compound, the feminine character, it may easily happen that the flavor is unpleasant in spite of excellent ingredients;

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.