Sunday, March 28, 2010 – It’s Complicated
Seek simplicity, and distrust it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead
Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
It’s clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do. ~ Alain de Botton
This is one of those views which are so absolutely absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them. ~ Bertrand Russell
The word ‘meaningful’ when used today is nearly always meaningless. ~ Paul Johnson
No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately. ~ Michel de Montaigne
Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it. ~ Samuel Johnson
A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts. ~ Paul Valery
A man may build a complicated piece of mechanism, or pilot a steamboat, but not more than five out of ten know how the apple got into the dumpling. ~ Edward A. Boyden
A man with a so-called character is often a simple piece of mechanism; he has often only one point of view for the extremely complicated relationships of life. ~ August Strindberg
A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind. ~ Clive Bell
At Wal-Mart, if you couldn’t explain an idea or a concept in simple terms on one page of paper Sam Walton considered the new idea too complicated to implement. ~ Michael Bergdahl
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore. ~ Wallace Stevens
Everything is more complicated than it looks to most people. ~ Frederick Lewis Allen
Everything’s complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness. ~ Nick Hornby
Guys are simple… women are not simple and they always assume that men must be just as complicated as they are, only way more mysterious. The whole point is guys are not thinking much. They are just what they appear to be. Tragically. ~ Dave Barry
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way did not become still more complicated. ~ Poul Anderson
I’m not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can’t play my stuff. It’s too complicated. ~ James Brown
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. ~ Charles Mingus
In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell… we can’t dance synonyms. ~ George Balanchine
It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately. ~ John Ruskin
The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make the rest of us wonder at the possibility that we might be missing something. ~ Gamal Abdel Nasser
Maybe nature is fundamentally ugly, chaotic and complicated. But if it’s like that, then I want out. ~ Steven Weinberg
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. ~ Barbara Kingsolver
Never trust any complicated cocktail that remains perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds. ~ Terry Prachett
Style is a simple way of saying complicated things. ~ Jean Cocteau
There’s no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another. ~ E. B. White
I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it. ~ Alan Perlis
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity. ~ Richard Dawkins
The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations. ~ David Deutsch
Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas … with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether. ~ Hunter S. Thompson
Just Above Sunset 