Quotes about Complexity

There is always one fact more in every man's case about which we know nothing.

Man is the only 150 pound nonlinear servomechanism that can be wholly reproduced by unskilled labor.

our manner of knowing is so weak that no philosopher could perfectly investigate the nature of even one little fly.

former atheist and astronomer Alan Sandage, said, "As I said before, the world is too complicated in all of its parts to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together. . . . The more one learns of biochemistry the more unbelievable it becomes unless there is some kind of organizing principle—an architect for believers.

In fact, the ripples are so exact (down to one part in one hundred thousand) that Smoot called them the "machining marks from the creation of the universe" and the "fingerprints of the maker."15

It is no use trying to sum people up.

For nothing was simply one thing.

We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?

There was in Lily a thread of something; a flare of something; something of her own Mrs. Ramsay liked very much indeed, but no man would, she feared. [...] He was not in love of course; it was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many.

And thus she made it impossible for me to roll out my sonorous phrases about 'elemental feelings,' the 'common stuff of humanity,' 'depths of the human heart,' and all those other phrases which support us in our belief that, however clever we may be on top, we are very serious, very profound and very humane underneath.

How explain to him that she, who had been lapped like a lily in folds of paduasoy, had hacked heads off, and lain with loose women among treasure sacks in the holds of pirate ships?...