Quotations on: Complexity

Everything is both simpler than we can imagine, and more complicated that we can conceive.

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

Out of intense complications intense simplicities emerge.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius —and a lot of courage —to move in the opposite direction.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

Plurality should not be assumed without necessity.

Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.

Understanding reduces the greatest to simplicity, and lack of its causes the least to take on the magnitude.

Never again will I make the simple into the complex. Something of true value does not become more valuable because it becomes complicated. Experience and conditions come and go; complications arise and fall away, but the simple action of God is eternal in the universe.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

Material blessings, when they pay beyond the category of need, are weirdly fruitful of headache.

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.

There is a simplicity that exists on the far side of complexity, and there is a communication of sentiment and attitude not to be discovered by careful exegesis of a text.

The most complex things are the simplest.

Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.

Partial culture runs to the ornate; extreme culture to simplicity.

Technical skill is mastery of complexity, while creativity is mastery of simplicity.

Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity.

Expert: Someone who brings confusion to simplicity.

To understand the whole it is necessary to understand the parts. To understand the parts, it is necessary to understand the whole. Such is the circle of understanding.

For the beginning is assuredly the end -- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.

Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience -- to appreciate the fact that life is complex.

The little things? The little moments? They aren't little.

The simplicities of natural laws arise through the complexities of the language we use for their expression.

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

Simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex.

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

Everything is complex and everything is simple. The rose has no why attached to it, it blooms because it blooms, how no thought of itself, or desire to be seen. What could be more complicated than a rose for someone who wants to understand it? What could be simpler for someone who wants nothing? The complexity of thinking, the simplicity of beholding.

Part of the problem today is that we have a surplus of simple answers and a shortage of simple problems.

We struggle with the complexities and avoid the simplicities.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's there are few.

When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is complex.

Step out onto the Planet. Draw a circle a hundred feet round. Inside the circle are 300 things nobody understands, and, maybe nobody's ever really seen. How many can you find?

Life emerged, I suggest, not simple, but complex and whole, and has remained complex and whole ever since—not because of a mysterious élan vital, but thanks to the simple, profound transformation of dead molecules into an organization by which each molecule's formation is catalyzed by some other molecule in the organization. The secret of life, the wellspring of reproduction, is not to be found in the beauty of Watson-Crick pairing, but in the achievement of collective catalytic closure. So, in another sense, life—complex, whole, emergent —is simple after all, a natural outgrowth of the world in which we live.

Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.

Three reasons problems are inevitable; first, we live in a world of growing complexity and diversity; second, we interact with people; and third, we cannot control all the situation we face.

The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity.

Dealing with complexity is an inefficient and unnecessary waste of time, attention and mental energy. There is never any justification for things being complex when they could be simple.

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of thegreatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues,which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven,thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals -- and critics of the Women's Movement.