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1 " The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or " accessing" what we now call " information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first. "
2 " I will tell you why I became a philosopher. I became a philosopher because I wanted to be able to talk about many, many things, ideally with knowledge, but sometimes not quite the amount of knowledge that I would need if I were to be a specialist in them. It allows you to be many different things. And plurality and complexity are very, very important to me. "
― Alexander Nehamas
3 " There is no such thing as objectivity. We are all just interpreting signals from the universe and trying to make sense of them. Dim, shaky, weak, static-y little signals that only hint at the complexity of a universe we cannot begin to understand. "
― Bones The Doctor in the Photo
4 " What, more realistically, is this “mutation,” the “new man”? He is the rootless man, discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the raw material of every demagogue’s dream; the “free-thinker” and skeptic, closed only to the truth but “open” to each new intellectual fashion because he himself has no intellectual foundation; the “seeker” after some “new revelation,” ready to believe anything new because true faith has been annihilated in him; the planner and experimenter, worshipping “fact” because he has abandoned truth, seeing the world as a vast laboratory in which he is free to determine what is “possible”; the autonomous man, pretending to the humility of only asking his “rights,” yet full of the pride that expects everything to be given him in a world where nothing is authoritatively forbidden; the man of the moment, without conscience or values and thus at the mercy of the strongest “stimulus”; the “rebel,” hating all restraint and authority because he himself is his own and only god; the “mass man,” this new barbarian, thoroughly “reduced” and “simplified” and capable of only the most elementary ideas, yet scornful of anyone who presumes to point out the higher things or the real complexity of life. "
― Seraphim Rose , Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age
5 " Neel cuts in: " Where'd you grow up?" " Palo Alto," she says. From there to Stanford to Google: for a girl obsessed with the outer limits of human potential, Kat has stayed pretty close to home. Neel nods knowingly. " The suburban mind cannot comprehend the emergent complexity of a New York sidewalk." " I don't know about that," Kat says, narrowing her eyes. " I'm pretty good with complexity." " See, I know what you're thinking," Neel says, shaking his head." You're thinking it's just an agent-based simulation, and everybody out here follows a pretty simple set of rules" -- Kat is nodding--" and if you can figure out those rules, you can model it. You can simulate the street, then the neighborhood, then the whole city. Right?" " Exactly. I mean, sure, I don't know what the rules are yet, but I could experiment and figure them out, and then it would be trivial--" " Wrong," Neel says, honking like a game-show buzzer. " You can't do it. Even if you know the rules-- and by the way, there are no rules--but even if there were, you can't model it. You know why?" My best friend and my girlfriend are sparring over simulations. I can only sit back and listen. Kat frowns. " Why?" " You don't have enough memory." " Oh, come on--" " Nope. You could never hold it all in memory. No computer's big enough. Not even your what's-it-called--" " The Big Box." " That's the one. It's not big enough. This box--" Neel stretches out his hands, encompasses the sidewalk, the park, the streets beyond--" is bigger." The snaking crowd surges forward. "
6 " All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it. "
― Joseph Conrad , The Secret Agent
7 " People often associate complexity with deeper meaning, when often after precious time has been lost, it is realized that simplicity is the key to everything. "
― Gary Hopkins
8 " I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me "
― Donald Miller
9 " I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike " identity" , must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest (" gay" , " black" , " Muslim" , whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity. "
10 " We are so fascinated by the complexity and beauty of the various forms in nature, that we have been led away from the formless dimension of Consciousness that lies at our very center. When you look at a person, you see many differences in their unique form, and often we compare, contrast, and judge one another because of the forms that we inhabit. But if you look beyond the various qualities and characteristics of form, and look another person in the eyes, you see a Being, and it is this Being that lies beneath the surface of form that connects us all. That is why the eyes are often referred to as the gateway to the soul, because they allow us to see and feel the presence of another Being, and realize our oneness. "
― Joseph P. Kauffman , The Answer Is YOU: A Guide to Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Freedom
11 " Philip thought that in throwing over the desire for happiness he was casting aside the last of his illusions. His life had seemed horrible when it was measured by its happiness, but now he seemed to gather strength as he realised that it might be measured by something else. Happiness mattered as little as pain. They came in, both of them, as all the other details of his life came in, to the elaboration of the design. He seemed for an instant to stand above the accidents of his existence, and he felt that they could not affect him again as they had done before. Whatever happened to him now would be one more motive to add to the complexity of the pattern, and when the end approached he would rejoice in its completion. It would be a work of art, and it would be none the less beautiful because he alone knew of its existence, and with his death it would at once cease to be. "
― W. Somerset Maugham , Of Human Bondage
12 " There's nothing more inspiring than the complexity and beauty of the human heart. "
― Cynthia Hand , Hallowed (Unearthly, #2)
13 " There is no ready vocabulary to describe the ways in which artists become artists, no recognition that artists must learn to be who they are (even as they cannot help being who they are.) We have a language that reflects how we learn to paint, but not how we learn to paint our paintings. How do you describe the [reader to place words here] that changes when craft swells to art?" Artists come together with the clear knowledge that when all is said and done, they will return to their studio and practice art alone. Period. That simple truth may be the deepest bond we share. The message across time from the painted bison and the carved ivory seal speaks not of the differences between the makers of that art and ourselves, but of the similarities. Today these similarities lay hidden beneath urban complexity -- audience, critics, economics, trivia -- in a self-conscious world. Only in those moments when we are truly working on our own work do we recover the fundamental connection we share with all makers of art. The rest may be necessary, but it's not art. Your job is to draw a line from your art to your life that is straight and clear. "
14 " Science is opposed to theological dogmas because science is founded on fact. To me, the universe is simply a great machine which never came into being and never will end. The human being is no exception to the natural order. Man, like the universe, is a machine. Nothing enters our minds or determines our actions which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs from without. Owing to the similarity of our construction and the sameness of our environment, we respond in like manner to similar stimuli, and from the concordance of our reactions, understanding is born. In the course of ages, mechanisms of infinite complexity are developed, but what we call 'soul' or 'spirit,' is nothing more than the sum of the functionings of the body. When this functioning ceases, the 'soul' or the 'spirit' ceases likewise.I expressed these ideas long before the behaviorists, led by Pavlov in Russia and by Watson in the United States, proclaimed their new psychology. This apparently mechanistic conception is not antagonistic to an ethical conception of life. "
― Nikola Tesla , Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla
15 " Constructively challenging authority requires the basic habits of mind a liberal education seeks to instill: the ability to frame the essential questions; to think critically, analytically, and ethically about the problems those questions identify; and to respond effectively, creatively, and wisely to the implications of the analysis. It requires not only an ability to appreciate the complexity of a problem but also to identify its essence in order to achieve effective, just, and fair conclusions. "
16 " I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it's my own choices that'll lock me in, it seems unavoidable--if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them. "
― David Foster Wallace , A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
17 " ... there was one new metallic monstrosity stacked in one corner that she hadn’t seen the last time she was a visitor to his strange chamber, it appeared to be a mass of hard drives all fused together, but they looked too sophisticated to be merely hard drives.“What on earth is that?” “That’s my Kung Fu,” he said proudly, patting the top of the futuristic-looking stack.“Is that what you wanted to show me?”“No, but it’s impressive, isn’t it?”“If you say so.”Steves sighed and shook his head, so few people could appreciate the intellectual complexity of an almost untraceable hacking device. "
― E.A. Bucchianeri , Brushstrokes of a Gadfly, (Gadfly Saga, #1)
18 " In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes. "
― Michael J. Behe , Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
19 " Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves. "
― Herbert A. Simon , The Sciences of the Artificial
20 " The most essential prediction of Darwinism is that, given an astronomical number of chances, unintelligent processes can make seemingly-designed systems, ones of the complexity of those found in the cell. ID specifically denies this, predicting that in the absence of intelligent input no such systems would develop. So Darwinism and ID make clear, opposite predictions of what we should find when we examine genetic results from a stupendous number of organisms that are under relentless pressure from natural selection. The recent genetic results are a stringent test. The results: 1) Darwinism’s prediction is falsified; 2) Design’s prediction is confirmed. "
― Michael J. Behe