top of page
.png){kind=small}
Complexity Quotes
"The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple."
67
"Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language."
48
"Simple systems are not feasible because they require infinite testing."
42
"I have been interested in phenomena involving complexity, diversity and evolution since I was a young boy."
40
"Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it."
40
"The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity."
39
"As American taxpayers know too well, the tax code is incredibly complex and compliance is all to expensive."
38
"Expansion means complexity and complexity decay."
38
"Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it."
37
"The Mozilla project is big in terms of lines of code and complexity."
37
"Maybe a mother wasn't what she seemed to be on the surface."
36
"We're very familiar with the idea that some things are so complex they're beyond our comprehension. This not only keeps us solving and experimenting but also distracted. Many things are really so simple we can't see them under our big noses."
36
"Some don't want to be happy, inasmuch as they undergo happiness merely as languor and yawning. They are dissatisfied with a bland and vacuous state of glee and, instead, prefer to keep on running like raging bulls through the whims and quirks of life. In reality, their dissatisfaction is their contentment. ['Happiness blowing in the wind']"
36
"The orthogonal features, when combined, can explode into complexity."
35
"As the complexity in any system increases, the ability to form a correct understanding decreases exponentially."
35
"There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another."
35
"It is clear to all that the animal organism is a highly complex system consisting of an almost infinite series of parts connected both with one another and, as a total complex, with the surrounding world, with which it is in a state of equilibrium."
35
"The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations."
33
"Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness."
33
"Dealing with any man means dealing with multiple personalities."
32
"In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity."
30
"I don't really have preferred roles except those with some complexity."
30
"She decided to make his life as terrible, tragic and complicated as possible, so that some day Percy Jackson would have a really hard time writing about it."
28
"In human character, simplicity doesn't exist except among simpletons."
28
"The nature of reality is such that every sufficiently complex event is statistically impossible, they are all one time events. This is a dynamic of novelty and so anything stable is forced to fluctuate including meaning. When we measure a thing we may not see the dynamics as a consequence of resolution. This is because the holographic information field has a nested hierarchy of scale."
28
"There is no such complicated situation which people could not make more complicated."
27
"I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it."
26
"The brain represented the most complex organism ever to exist, and impossible to tame. Morality could not be spawned by tweaking a few genes or shutting off a few neurons. Not yet. So though humanity conquered the very stars, it remained unable to conquer the darkness within."
26
"You know what is the most complicated feature of human nature? It is the term complication itself. We are never satisfied with keeping things simple. We always tend to exaggerate even the simplest phenomenon of this planet."
26
"It's simple, it's not that simple; or life is simple, but the things in it are not. When a man does not understand it, he tends to inflate it. When he does, he tends to deflate it. In the end, neither images are fully accurate."
24
"Many lies lie between one truth."
23
"Robust systems have a dynamic hierarchy of nested behaviors. How many moves ahead are you able to think when playing chess? How much effort are you willing to commit to understanding the deeply nuanced structure? Probably, success is not what you think it is. Adventures require novelty. Value has interesting surprises."
22
"There were so many different versions of him. It was countless versions of a song, and they were all original, and they were all true, and they were all right. It should have been impossible. Was I supposed to love them all?"
22
"Many books describe different problem solving techniques, but solving complicated problems in reality is not so easy."
21
"As a human I'm complex, as a human I don't have limits, but the book have it's own limits. All the time something good happens?? But why people don't continue to live in horror??It satisfies me, to see how people suck blood it's a symptom that you are watching a vampire... But it's to far isn't it??Sometimes to dream, how you dream and how you wake up in the dream and you wake up from that dream... wow that's awesome!?"
21
"Just a single cord is enough to be tangled."
17
"People are too complicated to have simple labels."
15
"My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
12
"The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do."
12
"Our heart calls us one way, the mind pulls us the other way, and we do the opposite. We cannot find peace when the mind rages war against the heart, when we fight with our thoughts the pull of our love."
7
bottom of page