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Complexity Quotes

Browse 1197 quotes about Complexity.

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Complexity Quotes

“Always remember, me dear, whether you're listening to a tale or telling one: Every penny piece that's struck has two sides to it.”

TwoRememberSidesPiecesListeningDearTalesComplexityPenniesTwo SidesRemember Me
Book:Collected Novels of E. M. Delafield (6 Unabridged Editions in One Volume): Zella Sees Herself, The War Workers, Consequences, Tension, The Heel of Achilles & Humbug by the Prolific Author of The Diary of a Provincial Lady, Thank Heaven Fasting and The Way Things Are
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“The key of writing fiction isn't just to remove something that the reader or listener can easily imagine. It's not a matter of being coy, or withholding information. It's allowing for multiple possibilities, recognizing the complexity of human behavior, and making the world of a piece of fiction as marvelously confounding as the world we live in.”

WorldWritingHumansMatterFictionPiecesImagineInformationPossibilityKeysReaderBehaviorComplexityRemoveAllowingMultipleListenersHuman BehaviorRecognizingWriting FictionWithholdingConfoundingComplexity Of HumanWithholding Information
Author:Peter Turchi
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“Treatment of the apparently whimsical fluctuations of the stock quotations as truly non stationary processes requires a model of such complexity that its practical value is likely to be limited. An additional complication, not encompassed by most stock market models, arises from the manifestation of the market as a nonzero sum game.”

ValuesGamesProcessModelsPracticalsAriseManifestationComplexityTreatmentQuotationsComplicationWhimsicalFluctuationStationary
Author:Richard Arnold Epstein
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“To invoke a Kierkegaardesque figure of speech, the beauty of the language of the Bible can be like a set of dentist's instruments nearly laid out on a table and hanging on a wall, intriguing in their technological complexity and with their stainless steel highly polished--until they set to work on the job for which they were originally designed. Then all of a sudden my reaction changes from "How shiny and beautiful they all are!" to "Get that damned thing out of my mouth!”

JobsBeautifulLanguageFiguresWallSpeechMouthsBibleTablesInstrumentsReactionsComplexitySteelTechnologicalIntriguingPolishedDentistInvokeHanging OnFigures Of Speech
Book:Whose Bible Is It?: A Short History of the Scriptures
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“Today, as we have seen, fascism and communism are discredited, but are replaced by a paraphilic consumer culture driven by fantasy, desperately in search of distractions and escalating sensations, and a fundamentalist culture wherein the rigors of a private journey are shunned in favor of an ideology that, at the expense of the paradoxes and complexities of truth, favors one-sided resolutions, black-and-white values, and a privileging of one's own complexes as the norm for others.”

TodayValuesCultureBlackWhiteFantasyJourneyComplexesDrivenFavorsIdeologyCommunismConsumersComplexityParadoxResolutionExpensesSensationsDistractionFascismBlack And WhiteReplacedNormFundamentalistRigorOne SidedConsumer CultureEscalating
Author:James Hollis
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“In moments of spiritual crisis we naturally fall back upon what worked for us, or seemed to work, heretofore. Sometimes this shows up through the reassertion of our old values in belligerent, testy ways. Regression of any kind is just such a return to old presumptions, often after they have been shown to be insufficient for the complexity of larger questions. The virtue of the old presumptions is that they once worked, or seemed to work, and therein lies if not certainty, then nostalgia for a previous, presumptive security. In our private lives, we frequently fall back upon our old roles.”

IfsWayKindHas BeensSometimesMomentsShowsSpiritualLyingValuesFallRolesVirtueSecurityReturnCrisisNostalgiaCertaintyComplexityPrivate LifeFall BackPresumptionInsufficientRegressionSpiritual CrisisOld Values
Book:What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life
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“It is a grave error for historians of literature to interpret the national spirit of the age in an oversimplified manner, ignoring the complexity of various cultural and life processes. Instead of using their imagination, they try to read the future by observing the hands of a clock which is still busy measuring the past.”

TryingStillsHandsAgePastSpiritLiteratureProcessImaginationErrorsBusyVariousGravesClockComplexityHistorianObservingMeasuring
Author:Mieczyslaw Jastrun
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“Thai food ain't about simplicity. It's about the juggling of disparate elements to create a harmonious finish. Like a complex musical chord it's got to have a smooth surface but it doesn't matter what's happening underneath. Simplicity isn't the dictum here, at all. Some westerners think it's a jumble of flavours, but to a Thai that's important, it's the complexity they delight in.”

ThinkingImportantMatterElementsHappeningsComplexesMusicalSimplicityDelightSurfaceComplexitySmoothChordsHarmoniousJugglingFlavourWesternersThaiThai Food
Author:David
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“Complexity is looking at interacting elements and asking how they form patterns and how the patterns unfold. It's important to point out that the patterns may never be finished. They're open-ended. In standard science this hit some things that most scientists have a negative reaction to. Science doesn't like perpetual novelty.”

MayImportantFormElementsStandardsNegativeScientistAskingPatternsFinishedReactionsComplexityPerpetualNoveltyInteractingNegative Reactions
Author:W. Brian Arthur
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“Insecure managers create complexity. Frightened, nervous managers use thick convoluted planning books and busy slides filled with everything they’ve known since childhood……. They worry that if they’re simple, people will think they’re simple minded. In reality, of course, it’s just the reverse. Clear, tough minded people are the most simple.”

PeopleIfsThinkingBookUseRealityCoursesSimpleKnownWorryClearChildhoodToughFilledBusyPlanningNervousManagersComplexityFrightenedThickReverseInsecureSlidesConvoluted
Author:Jack Welch
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“I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and/or creative writing degree you'll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters. And then smile very serenely until they say, Oh.”

PeopleWritingHumansMatterDesireMotivationAsksCreativeDegreesComplexityContradictionCreative WritingExaminationComplexity Of Human
Book:Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There
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“If you look at any leaf on any tree branch, it's similar to but not exactly a repetition of the previous branch. So the new science of complexity or showing how an architecture can be produced just as quickly, cheaply and efficiently by using computer production methods to get the slight variation, the self-similarity.”

IfsLooksSelfTreeComputerMethodProductionsArchitectureComplexityBranchesRepetitionLeafsVariationSimilarityTree Branches
Author:Charles Jencks
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“In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europehas endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form.”

MayArtProblemFormArtistForgetGrowingFinePureProfoundEndureWitNewspapersDiscussionMeritComplexityMapsIdleThreateningByzantine
Author:Marcel Proust
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“There is probably not one person, however great his virtue, who cannot be led by the complexities of life's circumstances to a familiarity with the vices he condemns the most vehemently--without his completely recognizing this vice which, disguised as certain events, touches him and wounds him: strange words, an inexplicable attitude, on a given night, of the person whom he otherwise has so many reasons to love.”

PersonsReasonNightCertainGivenAttitudeVirtueEventsStrangeCircumstancesVicesWoundsToleranceComplexityRecognizingFamiliarityInexplicableReason To Love
Author:Marcel Proust
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“I would call the attention of the reader to the difference between "reason" and "reasoning." Reason is a light, reasoning a process. Reason is a faculty, reasoning an exercise of that faculty. Reasoning proceeds from one truth to another by means of argumentation. This generally involves the whole mind in labor and complexity. But reason does not exist merely in order to engage in reasoning. The process is a means to an end. The true fulfillment of reason as a faculty is found when it can embrace the truth simply and without labor in the light of single intuition.”

MindMeanDoeEndsReasonWholeLightOrderFoundProcessDifferencesAttentionReaderExerciseLaborEmbraceIntuitionFulfillmentComplexityReasoningFacultyMeans To An EndArgumentation
Book:The Ascent to Truth
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“There might have been a hundred or a thousand life-bearing planets, had the course of evolution of the universe been a little different, or there might have been none at all. They would probably add, that, as life and man have been produced, that shows that their production was possible; and therefore, if not now then at some other time, if not here then in some other planet of some other sun, we should be sure to have come into existence; or if not precisely the same as we are, then something a little better or a little worse.”

IfsMenShouldBelieveLittlesHas BeensDifferentMatterShowsBodyMightUniverseCoursesForceExistenceConsciousnessSunPlanetsEvolutionThousandHundredAddProductionsComplexityMight Have BeenMarvellous
Author:Alfred Russel Wallace
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“Pakistan always seems to have a lot of political complexities and political challenges. But Pakistan is important for a number of reasons. Primarily, it is a nuclear power. And if, in fact, al Qaeda and Taliban, which are in Pakistan and causing a lot of tragedies and deaths in Pakistan - if they would ever somehow have real influence and control of that government, then we [world] really have a problem.”

IfsWorldImportantRealReasonFactsProblemSeemsGovernmentPoliticalChallengesNumbersInfluenceTragedyNuclearComplexityAlsPakistanAl QaedaTalibanNuclear Power
Author:Dan Quayle
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