Complexity Quotes - Page 29

• Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system.

  Yuri Lotman

  Poetry, Simplicity, Literature

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• Personalities are like impressionistic paintings. At a distance, each person is 'all of a piece'; up close, each is a bewildering complexity of moods, cognitions, and motives.

  Theodore Millon

  Distance, Personality, Pieces

  Theodore Millon, Roger Dale Davis (1996). “Disorders of personality: DSM-IV and beyond”, Wiley

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• Not one example of significant self-generation or self-organization can be found in the entire realm of nature.... Without causation, nothing happens and without organization by an intelligent being, systems tend to lower and lower levels of complexity.

  Hugh Ross

  Intelligent, Self, Organization

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• I love women because of their spirit, courage, and the things they go through in the process of family and life and then all the complexities and now the careers of the family and life and the whole thing. But I feel badly for our men in all of our traditions.

  Maya Tiwari

  Men, Careers, Spirit

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• The novel remains for me one of the few forms where we can record man's complexity and the strength and decency of his longings.

  John Cheever

  Men, Records, Longing

  John Cheever (1965). “The Wapshot chronicle”

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• By "essence" I understand a universal, of any degree of complexity and definition, which may be given immediately, whether to sense or to thought.... This object of pure sense or pure thought, with no belief superadded, an object inwardly complete and individual, but without external relations or physical status, is what I call an essence.

  George Santayana

  Essence, Degrees, May

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• The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach the white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.

  John Dos Passos

  Book, Creativity, Adventure

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• In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europehas endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Profound, Byzantine

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• There is probably not one person, however great his virtue, who cannot be led by the complexities of life's circumstances to a familiarity with the vices he condemns the most vehemently--without his completely recognizing this vice which, disguised as certain events, touches him and wounds him: strange words, an inexplicable attitude, on a given night, of the person whom he otherwise has so many reasons to love.

  Marcel Proust

  Attitude, Night, Tolerance

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• I would call the attention of the reader to the difference between "reason" and "reasoning." Reason is a light, reasoning a process. Reason is a faculty, reasoning an exercise of that faculty. Reasoning proceeds from one truth to another by means of argumentation. This generally involves the whole mind in labor and complexity. But reason does not exist merely in order to engage in reasoning. The process is a means to an end. The true fulfillment of reason as a faculty is found when it can embrace the truth simply and without labor in the light of single intuition.

  Thomas Merton

  Mean, Exercise, Light

  Thomas Merton (2002). “The Ascent to Truth”, p.213, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I think that I am among the few lucky ones who are exploiting complexity. Most people are unhappy with the emergence of complexity, they would prefer it if the world were very simple, but then it would be a doom for a cryptographer like myself.

  Adi Shamir

  Science, Simple, Thinking

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• Every single immigrant is part of a larger history that needs to be communicated in all its ambivalences and complexities.

  Jim Goldberg

  Needs, Immigrants, Ambivalence

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• Pakistan always seems to have a lot of political complexities and political challenges. But Pakistan is important for a number of reasons. Primarily, it is a nuclear power. And if, in fact, al Qaeda and Taliban, which are in Pakistan and causing a lot of tragedies and deaths in Pakistan - if they would ever somehow have real influence and control of that government, then we [world] really have a problem.

  Dan Quayle

  Real, Numbers, Government

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• During Prohibition, Atlantic City created the idea of the speakeasy, which turned into nightclubs and that extraordinary political complexity and corruption coming out of New Jersey at the time. The long hand that they had-and maybe still do-even had to do with presidential elections.

  Martin Scorsese

  Hands, Cities, Ideas

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Much time and money has gone into computer chess programs, and so far, no one's figured out how to crack the game, which I think speaks to chess's complexity.

  Wells Tower

  Thinking, Games, Cracks

  "Post Magazine: The King of Dupont Circle". Live Q&As, www.washingtonpost.com. October 1, 2007.

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• I tend to be much more in the present and my emotions are simpler. I can be happy, I can be sad, I can be depressed, but there's a complexity that I don't have. I don't brood the same way. Fear is my main emotion.

  Temple Grandin

  Way, Emotion, I Can

  "Temple Grandin On The Secret To Success For Kids With Autism". Interview with Macrina Cooper-White, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 29, 2014.

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• When a livestock farmer is willing to "practice complexity"-to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to-he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn't designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health.

  Michael Pollan

  Animal, Practice, Different

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• The Hawk and the Dove is a wonderful idea for a book, wonderfully carried out. Nicholas Thompson has used illuminating new material to present each of his protagonists in a convincing, respectful, but unsparing way. Even more valuable, he has used the interactions and tensions between Paul Nitze and George Kennan to bring much of American 20th century foreign policy to life, with human richness ever present but with the big issues clear in all their complexity.

  James Fallows

  Book, Ideas, Issues

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• I am interested not in individual readings, but in constructing networks of images and meanings capable of reflecting the complexity of the subject.

  Wolfgang Tillmans

  Reading, Individual, Reflecting

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• One, what would happen if everyone did this thing? Two, would this help or hinder the movement toward universal ultimate complexity?

  Gregory David Roberts

  Two, Movement, Helping

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• Every intelligent being enjoys complexity.

  Brenda Laurel

  Intelligent, Enjoy

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• No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist, or physician - and certainly no scholar, and therefore no serious university faculty member - pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity.

  Leon Botstein

  Artist, Faculty Members, Physicians

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• There's a certain fear of simplicity. I think that's the thing when you're younger as an artist you get this idea in your head that complexity equals quality. The more notes you're playing, the better.

  Patrick Stump

  Artist, Thinking, Ideas

  "Fall Out Boy Want To Be Your Gateway Drug". Interview with Jordan Sargent, www.spin.com. April 26, 2013.

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• The very act of thinking about power in our lives and experiences creates a process of revelation and self-analysis that may even make us look at ourselves in a new light... thinking about power and its complex manifestations may not simply lead to a better understanding of the abstract complexities of society, but may have an effect on one?s own image and identity. Perhaps a warning label should be placed on the cover.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Thinking, Self, Light

  Kenneth E. Boulding (1990). “Three Faces of Power”, p.259, SAGE

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• Any irrational fears?no, i'm quite a rationalist. i'm not superstitious, i think life is too full of natural wonders and logical complexities to worry about illogical things.

  Benedict Cumberbatch

  Thinking, Worry, Irrational Fear

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