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Complexity Quotes

Browse 1197 quotes about Complexity.

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Complexity Quotes

“I suspect that 'Kindness and Cruelty' and 'Mercy and Justice' all have secret affairs, as though they rendezvous only within certain sophisticated souls: those who hate being offensive, but love telling the truth.”

LoveMindMeanTruthHateJusticeBrainCompassionKindnessNiceTheoryBalanceEmpathyMercyAffairSimplicityCaringPityCrueltyCombinationComplexitySympathyOffensiveSuspiciousLove AffairCaring For OthersSophisticationApologeticsDuplicityRendezvous
Book:Healology
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“See the system. When you find yourself stuck in an oversimplified polarized conflict, a useful first step is to try to become more aware of the system as a whole: to provide more context to your understanding of the terrain in which the stakeholders are embedded, whether they are disputants, mediators, negotiators, lawyers, or other third parties. This can help you to see the forest and the trees; it is a critical step toward regaining some sense of accuracy, agency, possibility, and control in the situation.”

PeacePerspectiveComplexityConflict ResolutionConflictsFramingPolarizationOversimplificationUs Vs ThemIntractable Conflict
Book:The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts
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“Capitalist enterprises and activist enterprises are ultimately both human enterprises. They reflect the contradictions, complexities, and richness of the human beings that create them, own them, patronize them, move them, work for them, and manage them. They are imperfect and impure, just like the dedicated flawed people behind them. Too much progress has been needlessly impeded by arbitrary notions of purity and perfection.”

CapitalismActivismComplexityCapitalistHumanity And SocietyActivism Or Activist
Book:The Capitalist and the Activist: Corporate Social Activism and the New Business of Change
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“The Analytical Engine might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine… Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”

ShouldMightActionFoundSoundNumbersPiecesObjectsExpressionDegreesRelationHarmonyFundamentalsMusicalInstanceOperationsAbstractComplexityMutualEnginesMechanismCompositionAdaptationSusceptibleSupposingMutual FundMusical Composition
Author:Ada Lovelace
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“I have long admired the visceral storytelling and moral complexity of John Vaillant’s brilliant non-fiction about humankind’s tragically ambivalent relationship with the natural world. Now he brings his abundant literary gifts to a debut novel set in a very real borderland in which human beings are themselves treated like animals. The Jaguar’s Children is a beautifully rendered lament for an imperiled culture and the brave lives that would preserve it. You should read it.”

WorldShouldHumansChildrenLongRealCultureNaturalHuman BeingsAnimalFictionMoralNovelBraveBrilliantTreatedStorytellingPreservesComplexityHumankindNatural WorldNon FictionLamentVisceralDebutAmbivalentJaguars
Author:John Burnham Schwartz
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“I claim that many patterns of Nature are so irregular and fragmented, that, compared with Euclid - a term used in this work to denote all of standard geometry - Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity ... The existence of these patterns challenges us to study these forms that Euclid leaves aside as being "formless," to investigate the morphology of the "amorphous."”

DifferentFormScienceUsedTermChallengesLevelsExistenceStudyHigherDegreesStandardsClaimsPatternsComplexityGeometryExhibitsDifferent LevelsFragmentedEuclidMorphology
Author:Benoit Mandelbrot
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“There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth-fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness.”

EarthWorkVisionMysteryBandSkillsComplexityHobbiesEquipmentVocabularyFascinationFanaticsSpecializationTechnical SkillsUnexpectedness
Book:An American Childhood
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“If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.”

IfsKnowsHumansSelfFeelingsActionJoyArtistHumanityHuman BeingsAcceptingDoubtConditionsCreationWillingCapacityGuiltNakedComplexityHuman ConditionExtravaganceSelf-doubt
Book:Journal of a Solitude
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“The growing complexity of science, technology, and organization does not imply either a growing knowledge or a growing need for knowledge in the general population. On the contrary, the increasingly complex processes tend to lead to increasingly simple and easily understood products. The genius of mass production is precisely in its making more products more accessible, both economically and intellectually to more people.”

PeopleNeedsDoeProcessSimpleTechnologyGrowingProductsGeniusMassUnderstoodOrganizationComplexesPopulationProductionsContraryComplexityScience TechnologyMass ProductionGrowing Knowledge
Author:Thomas Sowell
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“Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good things in a complex system for granted, and just improve the things that are not so good. What is lacking in this conception is any sense that a society, an institution, or even a single human being, is an intricate system of fragile inter-relationships, whose complexities are little understood and easily destabilized.”

HumansLittlesGovernmentHuman BeingsUnderstoodInstitutionsGood ThingsComplexesGrantedComplexityAssumptionActivistConceptionFragileLackingIntricateImplicitComplex Systems
Book:Is Reality Optional?: And Other Essays
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“The meditator develops new depths of insight through direct communication with the reality of the phenomenal world... He or she is able to see not only the absence of complexity, the absence of duality, but the stoneness of stone and the waterness of water. One sees things precisely as they are, not merely in the physical sense, but with awareness of their spiritual significance.”

WorldRealityAbleSpiritualWaterAwarenessCommunicationStonesDirectDepthInsightAbsenceComplexitySignificanceDualityPhenomenalDirect Communication
Author:Chogyam Trungpa
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“It's the old idea that the process of evolution is some push in the direction of greater complexity--in particular greater intellectual complexity. In one twig of the tree of life, namely ours, having a big brain happened to have advantages. But that's just what worked for a particular species of primate 5 to 7 million years ago.”

YearsIdeasBigsProcessBrainMillionsGreaterHappenedTreeParticularEvolutionIntellectualAdvantageYears AgoSpeciesComplexityTree Of LifePrimatesTwigsOld Ideas
Author:Steven Pinker
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“If there is anything the artist or a true work of art teaches us, it is that variety and complexity really increase the unity, and that to achieve unity within a great variety of complexity is a greater achievement and more satisfying piece of art than to achieve unity with just a few elements, which is relatively easily achieved.”

IfsArtArtistTeachGreaterPiecesAchieveElementsAchievementIncreaseUnityVarietyComplexityWorks Of ArtSatisfying
Author:David Steindl-Rast
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