Complexity Quotes - Page 10

• Of all created things the source is one, Simple, single as love; remember The cell and seed of life, the sphere That is, of child, white bird, and small blue dragon-fly Green fern, and the gold four-petalled tormentilla The ultimate memory. Each latent cell puts out a future, Unfolds its differing complexity As a tree puts forth leaves, and spins a fate Fern-traced, bird feathered, or fish-scaled.

  Kathleen Raine

  Life, Memories, Children

  Kathleen Raine (1989). “Selected Poems”, p.55, SteinerBooks

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• Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. ... The geniuses of the computer field, on the the other hand, are the people with the keenest aesthetic senses, the ones who are capable of creating beauty. Beauty is decisive at every level: the most important interfaces, the most important programming languages, the winning algorithms are the beautiful ones.

  David Gelernter

  Beautiful, Learning, Winning

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• There is a race between the increasing complexity of the systems we build and our ability to develop intellectual tools for understanding their complexity. If the race is won by our tools, then systems will eventually become easier to use and more reliable. If not, they will continue to become harder to use and less reliable for all but a relatively small set of common tasks. Given how hard thinking is, if those intellectual tools are to succeed, they will have to substitute calculation for thought.

  Leslie Lamport

  Learning, Thinking, Race

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• The general problem with ambitious systems is complexity. [...] it is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties.

  Fernando J. Corbato

  Simplicity, Design, Important

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• Sometimes idiosyncrasies which used to be irritating become endearing, part of the complexity of a partner who has become woven deep into our own selves.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Marriage, Self, Woven

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage”, p.57, Open Road Media

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• Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.

  Alan Watts

  Unity, Chaos, Duality

  Alan Watts (2017). “Psychotherapy East & West”, p.126, New World Library

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• We are focused on features, not products. We eliminated future products that would have made the complexity problem worse. We don't want to have 20 different products that work in 20 different ways. I was getting lost at our site keeping track of everything. I would rather have a smaller set of products that have a shared set of features.

  Sergey Brin

  Success, Business, Track

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• Each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its humors, is also such a garden or such a pond.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Animal, Garden, Ponds

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• The road to hell is paved with the pursuit of volume. Volume leads to marginal products, marginal customers, and greatly increased managerial complexity.

  Richard Koch

  Work, Hell, Pursuit

  Richard Koch (2011). “The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less”, p.93, Crown Business

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• Unity is plural and, at a minimum, is two.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Two, Unity, Chaos

  R. Buckminster Fuller “Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity”, Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

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• Amazing fine tuning occurs in the laws that make this complexity possible. Realization of the complexity of what is accomplished makes it very difficult not to use the word 'miraculous' without taking a stand as to the ontological status of the word.

  George F. R. Ellis

  Science, Law, If There Is A God

  "The Anthropic Principle: Laws and Environments". Article in "The Anthropic Principle: Proceedings of the Second Venice Conference on Cosmology and Philosophy", book edited by F. Bertola and U. Curi, Cambridge University Press, p. 30, 1988.

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• It's the old idea that the process of evolution is some push in the direction of greater complexity--in particular greater intellectual complexity. In one twig of the tree of life, namely ours, having a big brain happened to have advantages. But that's just what worked for a particular species of primate 5 to 7 million years ago.

  Steven Pinker

  Ideas, Years, Tree

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• This approach to voice is designed to liberate the natural voice and thereby develop a vocal technique that serves the freedom of human expression. The basic assumption of the work is that everyone possesses a voice capable of expressing, through a two- to four-octave natural pitch range, whatever gamut of emotion, complexity of mood, and subtlety of thought he or she experiences.

  Kristin Linklater

  Expression, Two, Voice

  Kristin Linklater (2006). “Freeing the Natural Voice: Imagery and Art in the Practice of Voice and Language”, Nick Hern Books

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• A model is done when nothing else can be taken out.

  Freeman Dyson

  Taken, Simplicity, Done

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• The ideological are individuals ultimately swamped by the complexities of modern life and political and economic relations; they have deliberately attached themselves to some caricatural maven like Falwell or Limbaugh who speaks to their manipulable pathos. The gulf between such individuals' education or intellectual competence or information and the actual issues of our times is simply too great. They were bred to be culture-media for false consciousness, junkies who crawl on their bellies across broken glass for another hit of "clarifying wisdom" from some ideological Pope.

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Media, Issues

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• It's not that we need to form new organizations. It's simply that we have to awaken to new ways of thinking. I believe it makes no sense to spend a lot of time attacking the current realities. It is time to create the new models that have in them the complexity that makes the older systems obsolete. And to the extent that we can do that, and do that quickly, I think we can provide what will be necessary for a major breakthrough for the future.

  Don Edward Beck

  Believe, Reality, Thinking

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• The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.

  Aldo Leopold

  Discovery, Land, Radio

  Aldo Leopold (1972). “Round River”, p.108, Oxford University Press

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• Lenelle Moïse's poems render the abstract - policy, disaster, history, diaspora - specific. Her words make the political not just personal, but corporeal: the beautiful system of the human body as canvas and subject, perfect in all its attendant complications and complexity, and still ruled, undeniably, by a warm, beating heart.

  Erin McKeown

  Beautiful, Heart, Perfect

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• Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.

  Thomas Sowell

  Technology, Simplicity, Progress

  Thomas Sowell (1996). “Knowledge And Decisions”, p.11, Basic Books

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• Tax complexity itself is a kind of tax.

  Max Baucus

  Kind, Taxes

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• I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. [...] If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual", each of them is a "multitude".

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Years, Ideas, People

  "The Creative Personality". www.psychologytoday.com. July 1, 1996.

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• I write because I admire the act of rationalization, of seeking clarity in one's understanding of the complexities of life, and I'm bad at it. I'm slow. Writing, which is an arduous and slow process, proceeds at the same rate as my sloth-like mind.

  Gregory Maguire

  Writing, Understanding, Sloth

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• The meditator develops new depths of insight through direct communication with the reality of the phenomenal world... He or she is able to see not only the absence of complexity, the absence of duality, but the stoneness of stone and the waterness of water. One sees things precisely as they are, not merely in the physical sense, but with awareness of their spiritual significance.

  Chogyam Trungpa

  Spiritual, Communication, Reality

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• We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it still with us.

  Northrop Frye

  Writing, Looks, Use

  Northrop Frye (1964). “The Educated Imagination”, p.56, Indiana University Press

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• To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems...which he has to solve...And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of-such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilized amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity....Perhaps the first thing he can learn form the artists is that the only way of 'mastering' one's material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Love, Mean, Men

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