Quotes about Complexity

Many people find the universe confusing - it's not.

There's a lot more to being a woman than being a mother, but there's a hell of a lot more to being a mother than most people suspect.

One of the things I've come to appreciate about the brain is the importance of location. It's not just a set of interchangeable parts that you can swap in and out.

Democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.

The same strength which has extended our power beyond a continent has also interwoven our destiny with the destiny of many peoples and brought us into a vast web of history in which other wills, running in oblique or contrasting directions to our own, inevitably hinder or contradict what we most fervently desire. We cannot simply have our way, not even when we believe our way to have the "happiness of mankind" as its promise.

There are no simple congruities in life or history. The cult of happiness erroneously assumes them.

It is the nature of a business community that it deals with the covert forms of power in economic life and to be insensible to the significance and the complexity of more overt forms of power, even as it is insensible to the motive of the lust for power as an element in human nature.

Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.

The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young. —JAMES HOLLIS, FINDING MEANING IN THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE

Mystery is not something that you cannot understand, but it is something that is endlessly understandable! It is multilayered and pregnant with meaning and never totally admits to closure or resolution.

This new coherence, a unified field inclusive of the paradoxes, is precisely what gradually characterizes a second-half-of-life person. It feels like a return to simplicity after having learned from all the complexity. Finally, at last, one has lived long enough to see that "everything belongs,"4 even the sad, absurd, and futile parts.

We need to hold together all of the stages of life, and for some strange, wonderful reason, it all becomes quite "simple" as we approach our later years.