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Complexes Quotes

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Complexes Quotes

“All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.”

ArtMadeFormPurposeDivineHolyEssenceMereComplexesPatientStorytellingColourMagicianSecrecyMedievalSymbolicPonderingPortraitureTalismans
Author:William Butler Yeats
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“We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place and make sense of us by focusing exclusively either on the uniqueness or the unity are doomed to failure. But we must not stop asking and questing because the answers are complex and ambiguous.”

AnswersDangerousEssentialsAskingUnityComplexesMake SenseTensionUniquenessDoomedAmbiguous
Book:Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History
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“We can now determine, easily and relatively cheaply, the detailed chemical architecture of genes ; and we can trace the products of these genes ( enzymes and proteins ) as they influence the course of embryology . In so doing we have made the astounding discovery that all complex animal phyla - arthropods and vertebrates in particular - have retained, despite their half-billion years of evolutionary independence, an extensive set of common genetic blueprints for building bodies.”

YearsMadeBodyCoursesAnimalCommonHalfInfluenceBuildingParticularProductsDiscoveryIndependenceComplexesDetermineArchitectureBillionsDespiteChemicalsGenesProteinBlueprintsEnzymesVertebratesArthropods
Book:Leonardo's Mountain Of Clams
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“[G]enes make enzymes, and enzymes control the rates of chemical processes. Genes do not make "novelty seeking" or any other complex and overt behavior. Predisposition via a long chain of complex chemical reactions, mediated through a more complex series of life's circumstances, does not equal identification or even causation.”

LongDoeProcessCircumstancesEqualBehaviorSeriesComplexesRateSeekingReactionsChainsChemicalsGenesNoveltyIdentificationCausationChemical ReactionsEnzymes
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word. Perhaps our gut feeling that it cannot be so reflects only our hopes and prejudices, our desperate striving to make sense of a complex and confusing world, and not the ways of nature.”

WorldWayFeelingsCausesEventsPrejudiceComplexesStriveMake SenseDesperateGutsDescriptionConventionalConfusingAdequateRandomnessGut Feelings
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device.”

NeedsWellsPhilosophyStoriesUseLawDifficultCasesExampleFieldsTheoryStandardsScientistFunctionComplexesInsightSillyDevicesMechanismAbstractionSpeculationIllustrationRhetoricalHypothetical
Book:Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms
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“I have often been amused by our vulgar tendency to take complex issues, with solutions at neither extreme of a continuum of possibilities, and break them into dichotomies, assigning one group to one pole and the other to an opposite end, with no acknowledgment of subtleties and intermediate positions and nearly always with moral opprobrium attached to opponents.”

EndsMoralBreakIssuesGroupsPossibilityPositionSolutionsOppositesComplexesExtremesTendenciesOpponentsVulgarSubtletyAmusedContinuumDichotomyAcknowledgment
Book:The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History
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“In creating the strange milieu in which your story takes place, you must first understand as well as you possibly can the familiar milieu in which your own life is taking place. Until you have examined and comprehended the world around you, you can't possibly create a complex and believable imaginary world.”

WorldFirstsWellsStoriesLife IsStrangeCreatingComplexesFamiliarImaginaryBelievableMilieuImaginary World
Book:How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy
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“Childhood is analogous to language learning. It has a biological basis but cannot be realized unless a social environment triggers and nurtures it, that is, has need of it. If a culture is dominated by a medium that requires the segregation of the young in order that they learn unnatural, specialized, and complex skills and attitudes, then childhood, in one form or another, will emerge, articulate and indispensable.”

IfsNeedsFormYoungOrderCultureLanguageSocialAttitudeEnvironmentChildhoodSkillsBasesComplexesMediumsNurtureIndispensableSegregationTriggersUnnaturalLanguage LearningSocial Environment
Author:Neil Postman
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“The more complex our security becomes, the more complex our enemy's efforts must be.The more we seek to shut him out, the better he must learn to become at breaking in.Each new level of security that we manage becomes no more than a stepping-stone for him who would surpass us, for he bases his next assault upon our best defenses.It is a ware that can never truly be won… but one we dare not lose.”

NextLosesLevelsEffortEnemySecurityStonesBasesComplexesDareDefenseManageAssaultStepping Stones
Book:This Alien Shore
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“I am constantly astonished by the people, otherwise intelligent, who think that anything so complex and delicate as a marriage can be left to take care of itself. One sees them fussing about all sorts of lesser concerns, apparently unaware that side by side with them often in the same bed a human creature is perishing from lack of affection, of emotional malnutrition.”

PeopleThinkingHumansCareLeftSidesEmotionalBedCreaturesConcernIntelligentComplexesAffectionTake CareDelicateMalnutritionPerishingFussing
Author:Robertson Davies
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“It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.”

ComplexesThinkerPrimitiveInferiorsShortcuts
Book:H. P. LOVECRAFT äóñ The Ultimate Horror Collection: 60 Occult & Supernatural Mysteries in One Volume: The Greatest Spine-Chilling and Blood-Curdling Stories of Terror & Macabre: The Call of Cthulhu, The White Ship, The Dunwich Horror, At The Mountains Of Madness, The Whisperer in Darknessäó_
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“Complex organisms cannot be construed as the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build particular items of anatomy or behavior by themselves. Most genes influence several aspects of anatomy and behavior as they operate through complex interactions with other genes and their products, and with environmental factors both within and outside the developing organism. We fall into a deep error, not just a harmful oversimplification, when we speak of genes "for" particular items of anatomy or behavior.”

FallSpeakInfluenceParticularProductsBehaviorAspectErrorsComplexesEnvironmentalFactorsDevelopingGenesInteractionOrganismsItemsAnatomyOversimplificationInteraction With OthersEnvironmental Factors
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of self-conscious philosophy and art). Even the most "obvious," "accurate," and "natural" style of thinking or drawing must be regulated by history and won by struggle. Solutions must therefore arise within a social context and record the complex interactions of mind and environment that define the possibility of human improvement.”

ThinkingMindFirstsHumansLittlesArtSelfPhilosophySocialNaturalPoorNovelStruggleRecordsEnvironmentStylePossibilityCreaturesSolutionsConsciousSpeciesComplexesObviousDrawingImprovementExperimentsInventionAriseInteractionAccurateSelf Conscious
Book:Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms
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“The reputation of a Don Juan gives to a man the most dangerous power. Wise virgins resist it, but foolish virgins frequently yield to the desire to take a celebrated lover from a rival - even from a friend. This emotion is a complex one, mad up of vanity, respect for another woman's taste, and the need to establish self-assurance by winning a difficult victory. Don Juan chose his first mistresses; later he was chosen.”

MenNeedsGivingFirstsSelfDesireWinningDifficultEmotionWiseDangerousLoversVictoryTasteMadComplexesFoolishChosenReputationVanityYieldVirginsAssuranceRivalsMistressDon JuanAnother WomanJuanSelf Assurance
Author:Andre Maurois
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“It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a tangle, and seek freedom in retirement, as Thoreau sought at Walden Pond. They do not, however, in this manner escape from the social institutions of their time, nor do they really mean to do so; what they gain, if they are successful, is a saner relation to them.”

IfsFeelsMeanPersonsHappensCertainSocialSuccessfulGainsRelationInstitutionsComplexesActiveComplexityRetirementReally MeanPondsInsistenceSocial InstitutionsWalden Pond
Book:Human Nature and the Social Order
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“The definitions of humanism are many, but let us here take it to be the attitude of those men who think it an advantage to live in society, and, at that, in a complex and highly developed society, and who believe that man fulfills his nature and reaches his proper stature in this circumstance. The personal virtues which humanism cherishes are intelligence, amenity, and tolerance; the particular courage it asks for is that which is exercised in the support of these virtues. The qualities of intelligence which it chiefly prizes are modulation and flexibility.”

ThinkingMenBelieveAsksAttitudeQualitySupportVirtueParticularCircumstancesAdvantageComplexesHumanismDefinitionsTolerancePrizeCherishFlexibilityStatureAmenities
Author:Lionel Trilling
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“Germany is a fascinating role model. The Germans have maintained their manufacturing edge despite being a high-tax, high-regulation economy. Why? Because the government really set about ensuring that it maintained funding for technical training, technical advancements and programs. It made a concerted effort to retain high-end, complex manufacturing -- the kind of BMW model, if you will. And they've done that so successfully that Germany, which has a quarter of America's population, exports more than America does.”

IfsKindDoeMadeEndsDoneGovernmentAmericaEffortRolesEconomyTaxesModelsTrainingProgramComplexesEdgesPopulationDespiteGermanyFascinatingRole ModelsQuartersRegulationAdvancementFundingManufacturingBmwHigh TaxesTechnical Training
Author:Fareed Zakaria
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“Political society wants things simple. Political scientists know them to be complex... One could argue that, in part, the leftist impulse is so conspicuous among the educated and well-to-do precisely because they are exposed to more information, and are accordingly forced to choose between living with the strains of complexity, or lapsing into simplism.”

KnowsWantWellsPoliticalSimpleInformationScientistComplexesArguingEducatedImpulseComplexityExposedStrainLeftists
Book:Coping: On the Practice of Government
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“What seems interesting to me is to reproduce in the figurative representation of an object the whole complex system of impressions we receive in the normal course of everyday life, the way this affects our feelings and the shape it takes in our memory; and it is to this that I have always applied myself.”

WayWholeFeelingsSeemsCoursesMemoriesInterestingObjectsShapesNormalComplexesEverydayImpressionRepresentationEveryday LifeOur MemoriesComplex Systems
Author:Jean Dubuffet
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“It is known to all persons who are conversant in experimental philosophy, that there are many little attentions and precautions necessary to be observed in the conducting of experiments, which cannot well be described in words, but which it is needless to describe, since practice will necessarily suggest them; though, like all other arts in which the hands and fingers are made use of, it is only much practice that can enable a person to go through complex experiments, of this or any kind, with ease and readiness.”

WellsKindLittlesPersonsArtMadePhilosophyUseHandsAttentionKnownPracticeFingersComplexesExperimentsEaseReadinessConductingPrecaution
Book:Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air
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