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Complexity Quotes

Browse 1197 quotes about Complexity.

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Complexity Quotes

“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.”

Human NatureComplexityHuman BehaviorPsychology QuotesNeuropsychologySimplicity In LifeHuman Nature QuotesComplexity Of LifeHuman Nature WisdomPsychology TodaySimplicity And JoyComplexity Of Thought
Book:What is Mind?
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“I was frightened of so many things, in my vanity, that ultimately i couldn't protect myself any other way. Try not to be like that, okay? Be sure to keep your tummy warm, try to relax, both your heart and your body, try not to get flustered. Live like a flower. You have that right. It's something you can achieve, for sure, in your lifetime. And it's enough.”

LifeHumanityFearHuman NatureFlowerLifestyleComplexityDelicacyWay Of Life
Book:The Lake
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“Neurodivergence doesn’t follow a straight line. It curves, overlaps, and branches into complex, beautiful configurations.”

InspirationHumanityIdentityPerspectiveEmpowermentAuthenticityComplexitySelf AcceptanceInclusionNeurodiversity
Book:The Therapist's Handbook for Neurodivergent People: A NeuroFlex ACT Guide for Living Fully with ADHD, Autism, OCD, and a Neurodivergent Life
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“Techistentialism studies the nature of human beings, existence, and decision-making in our technological world. Today, we face both technological and existential conditions that can no longer be separated. We define this phenomenon as Techistentialism.”

HumanityTechnologyComplexityExistentialismDecision MakingArtificial IntelligenceExistentialAutomationTechistentialismTechistential
Book:Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World
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“I think all of us need to do a better job of seeing the humanity of people on the other side of the aisle. Because I think what happens in this country right now is: The left says to the right, “What do you know about pain, white straight man? My pain is real, as an L.G.B.T.Q. person.” And the right says to the left, “What do you know about pain, college-educated, cosmopolitan élite? My pain is real, in a post-industrial community ravaged by the opioid crisis.” And I know that, when I am upset, the worst thing that someone can say to me, even if it is said with the best of intentions, is “It’s not as bad as you think.” Any therapist will tell you that the first step to healing is to have your pain seen and validated. And I think all of us have to do a better job of recognizing that people don’t have to be right in our mind for what they’re facing to be wrong. And people don’t have to be right in our minds for us to try to right that wrong. That comes down to sort of a core recognition that every single person is more than just one thing about them. And every single person is more than even beliefs that might personally hurt many other people.”

PainHumanityPoliticsEmpathyComplexityDivisionValidationPolarizationFeeling Seen
Author:Sarah McBride
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“I'm gonna be really real with you. People are a fucking mess. We love to complicate simple shit, and simplify complicated shit. Sometimes, we get so caught up in trying to follow the rules that we forget to question whether or not the rules make sense. What works for Miles and Shante won't necessarily work for you, just like what works for Mom and Dad doesn't work for me. Remember what I said about being honest.”

HumanityComplexityRules
Book:Daniel, Deconstructed: A Sweet YA Romance About an Autistic Teen Playing Matchmaker
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“We have long known that in closed societies, the the arrival of democracy, with its clashing voices and differing opinions, can be "complex and frightening," as [Karen] Stenner puts it, for people unaccustomed to public dissent. The noise of argument, the constant hum of disagreement--these can irritate people who prefer to live in a society tied together by a single narrative. The strong preference for unity, at least among a portion of the population, helps explain why numerous liberal or democratic revolutions, from 1789 onward, ended in dictatorships that enjoyed wide support. Isaiah Berlin once wrote of the human need to believe that "somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science... there is a final solution." Berlin observed that not all of the things that human beings think are good or desirable are compatible. Efficiency, liberty, justice, equality, the demands of the individual, and the demands of the group--all these things push us in different directions. And this, Berlin wrote, is unacceptable to many people: "to admit that the fulfilment of some of our ideals may in principle make the fulfilment of others impossible is to say that the notion of total human fulfilment is a formal contradiction, a metaphysical chimera." Nevertheless, unity is a chimera that some will always pursue.”

HumanityPoliticsDemocracyUnitySimplicityComplexityDiscomfortDisagreementArguments
Book:Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism
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“Complexity’s biggest dangers arise when we are mired in assumptions and boxed into existing sectors and industries instead of noticing new patterns on the fringe and changes emerging over time.”

ChangeTechnologyComplexityForesightDisruptionAssumptionsFutures ThinkingLiminalDisruptionption
Book:The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation
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“The 1920s, ’30s, and early ’40s were a time of rising nationalism coupled with technology-driven angst and revulsion at governments that appeared to be both corrupt and relics of an earlier age. The widespread questioning and tottering of faith caused prospective Fascist leaders to test their training wheels and spurred movements and fads of every description, from mysticism and belief in fairies to flagpole-sitting and a flirtation across the political spectrum with eugenics and its accompanying racial theories. Mussolini’s early success energized those whose primary fear was Bolshevism or what they imagined to be Bolshevism: loud demands for higher wages, for example, or campaigns for land reform. In virtually every country, there were veterans who—regardless of which side they had fought on during the war—were contemptuous of civilian politicians. Anti-Semitism, whether casual or visceral, flourished in politics, the professions, academia, and the arts. The bewildering rush of globalization prompted many to find solace in the familiar rhythms of nation, culture, and faith; and people everywhere seemed to be on the lookout for leaders who claimed to have simple and satisfying answers to modernity’s tangled questions.”

GovernmentChangeSimplicityComplexityNationalismFascism20th CenturyAntisemitismBolshevismBenito Mussolini
Book:Fascism: A Warning
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“This is a critical year--maybe the last critical year if we get this wrong--when we are all challenged to recognize how we have benefitted and continue to benefit from unearned privilege (as well as how we have been denied and disrespected, even in ways that we have perceived as privilege, or as our right). We all must be willing to look, to acknowledge, to own the complex reality which is our history, our country, our lives. It is not enough to go to a house of prayer and ask God for forgiveness. It is not enough that we forgive each other, not enough to forgive ourselves. We must extend effort to repair damage in which we have participated and/or from which we have received benefit... We must do differently moving forward.”

AmericaGrowthChangePrivilegeHealComplexityChallengeAtonementReap What You SowYom Kippur
Author:Shellen Lubin
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“To love is to think. And I almost forget to feel only from thinking about her. I don’t know what I want at all, even from her, and I don’t think about anything but her. I have a great animated distraction. When I want to meet her, I almost feel like not meeting her, So I don’t have to leave her afterwards. And I prefer thinking about her, because it’s like I’m afraid of her. I don’t know what I want at all, and I don’t want to know what I want. All I want to do is think about her. I’m asking nothing of nobody, not even her, except to think.”

ThinkingLoveTruthEmotionLongingConfusionComplexityWantingPantheismAmbivalenceFallen In LovePaganis
Book:O Pastor Amoroso
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“[Rising diversity and complexity are] the predicted outcome for evolution in the total absence of selection and other forces. They are the zero-force expectation. The reason is simply that variation arises in biological systems, and when heritable it accumulates, with the result that variances tend to increase. And both diversity and complexity are aspects of variance.”

EvolutionDiversityComplexitySelectionEvolutionary BiologyVariance
Book:Biology's First Law: The Tendency for Diversity and Complexity to Increase in Evolutionary Systems
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“Since the eighteenth century, clerical and military critics of liberalism have pictured it as a doctrine that achieves its public goods, peace, prosperity, and security by encouraging private vice. Selfishness in all its possible forms is said to be its essence, purpose, and outcome. This, it is said now and then, is inevitable once martial virtue and the discipline imposed by God are discarded. Nothing could be more remote from the truth. The very refusal to use public coercion to impose creedal unanimity and uniform standards of behavior demands an enormous degree of self-control. Tolerance consistently applied is more difficult and morally more demanding than repression. Moreover, the liberalism of fear, which makes cruelty the first vice, quite rightly recognizes that fear reduces us to mere reactive units of sensation and that this does impose a public ethos on us. One begins with what is to be avoided, as Montaigne feared being afraid most of all. Courage is to be prized, since it both prevents us from being cruel, as cowards so often are, and fortifies us against fear from threats, both physical and moral. This is, to be sure, not the courage of the armed, but that of their likely victims. This is a liberalism that was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. ... The alternative then set, and still before us, is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence, but between cruel military and moral repression and violence, and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen, old or young, male or female, black or white. Far from being an amoral free-for-all, liberalism is, in fact, extremely difficult and constraining, far too much so for those who cannot endure contradiction, complexity, diversity, and the risks of freedom.”

ReligionFreedomLibertyDiversityComplexityLiberalismRepressionOlerance
Book:Ordinary Vices
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“Social network complexity: People with more diversified, complex social networks have been found to be more tolerant of out-groups and more supportive of policies helpful to them. They tend to have more positive out-group experiences, share more interests with people outside their own groups, and learn more about the contributions of out-group members and the problems they face.”

ConflictDiversitySocial MediaToleranceComplexityOpennessSocial NetworkingOpen MindednessConflict Resolution
Book:The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts
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“With any other man I should have flown outright into a dreadful passion, scorned all further words, and thrust him ignominiously from my presence. But there was something about Bartleby that not only strangely disarmed me, but in a wonderful manner touched and disconcerted me”

EmpathyComplexityFrustrationIntriguePowerlessnessEnigma
Book:Bartelby The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street — A Classic Tale of Isolation and Resistance by the Author of Moby-Dick
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“In her search for solutions [to high conflict], [Amanda] Ripley shows that the process of escaping these situations usually involves five steps. Participants in the conflict, she suggests, need to “investigate the understory” that made them so invested in the first place. They should “reduce the binary,” recognizing that they may share more values and interests with their adversaries than they realize. They must “marginalize the fire starters,” ceasing to listen to those who seem to get a thrill out of the fight. They should “buy time and make space,” stopping themselves from escalating when they feel triggered. Most important, they need to “complicate the narrative,” recognizing that any story in which one side consists of pure heroes and the other of cartoonish villains is unlikely to be altogether accurate.”

BooksConflictEmpathyComplexityDeescalationHigh ConflictAmanda Ripley
Author:Yascha Mounk
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“What do you most get out of the artwork that you love the most? And answering my own question, I would hesitate to say that it is communing with someone else’s pain and frailty; it is the empathetic tear of another voice that is like yours but with more experience; it is your own adoration of a complex idea simply and acutely expressed. But chiefly it is that the work is located in the real.”

LoveArtRealityPainCommunicationEmpathySimplicityComplexity
Book:Rules for Mavericks: A Manifesto for Dissident Creatives
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“Now many of us celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day (instead of or along with Thanksgiving, Turkey Day, Family Feud and/or Family Fun and Games). I see it as a day to learn more about the people whose land we stole (yes, even we whose forebearers came more recently, because we continue to benefit from the theft), and to sit in the complexity that is the building and continuation of our civilization.”

LearningCivilizationComplexityThanksgivingTheftBuildIndigenous PeoplesIndigenous Peoples Day
Author:Shellen Lubin
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