Complexity Quotes

Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Complexity.

If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them,

If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.

Science Complexity

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole.

Murray Gell-Mann

Science Complexity Systems

His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological pheno

His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.

Life Love Desire Passion Curiosity Psychology Complexity

Sufficiently simple natural structures are predictable but u

Sufficiently simple natural structures are predictable but uncontrollable, whereas sufficiently complex symbolic descriptions are controllable but unpredictable.

Science Philosophy Complexity Systems

With genetic engineering, we will be able to increase the co

With genetic engineering, we will be able to increase the complexity of our DNA, and improve the human race. But it will be a slow process, because one will have to wait about 18 years to see the effect of changes to the genetic code.

Stephen Hawking

Code Complexity Wait

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.

Life Love Science Unity Complexity Sea

Another grave limitation of language is that it cannot, like

Another grave limitation of language is that it cannot, like music or gesture, do more than one thing at once. However the words in a great poet's phrase interinanimate one another and strike the mind as a quasi-instantaneous chord, yet, strictly speaking, each word must be read or heard before the next. That way, language is as unilinear as time. Hence, in narrative, the great difficulty of presenting a very complicated change which happens suddenly. If we do justice to the complexity, the time the reader must take over the passage will destroy the feeling of suddenness. If we get the suddenness we shall not be able to get in the complexity. I am not saying that genius will not find its own way of palliating this defect in the instrument; only that the instrument is in this way defective.

Time Language Complexity

Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to

Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Philosophy Complexity Human Systems