Sunday, December 15, 2019 – Just Too Complicated
Seek simplicity, and distrust it. ~ Alfred North Whitehead
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
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
Everything’s complicated – even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness. ~ Nick Hornby
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it. ~ Alan Perlis
Style is a simple way of saying complicated things. ~ Jean Cocteau
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. ~ Charles Mingus
I’m not going to be joining ZZ Top. You know they can’t play my stuff. It’s too complicated. ~ James Brown
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
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
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
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
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. ~ Paul Anderson
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
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
Never trust any complicated cocktail that remains perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds. ~ Terry Prachett
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
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
Age does not diminish the extreme disappointment of having a scoop of ice cream fall from the cone. ~ Jim Fiebig
Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy – the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation. ~ Eric Hoffer
Present, n. That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope. ~ Ambrose Bierce
Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever puts one down without the feeling of disappointment. ~ Charles Lamb
I wish I had had a great disappointment, a real one. ~ Nastassja Kinski
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment. ~ Henry David Thoreau
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes. ~ Thomas Hardy
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. ~ Barbara Kingsolver
Mean spirits under disappointment, like small beer in a thunderstorm, always turn sour. ~ John Randolph
Disappointment to a noble soul is what cold water is to burning metal; it strengthens, tempers, intensifies – but never destroys it. ~ Eliza Tabor
Disappointments are to the soul what the thunder-storm is to the air. ~ Friedrich von Schiller
The pleasure of expecting enjoyment is often greater than that of obtaining it and the completion of almost every wish is found a disappointment. ~ Samuel Johnson
Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood, for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories. ~ Graham Greene
It’s precisely the disappointing stories which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning that sound true to life. ~ Max Frisch
You’re always a little disappointing in person because you can’t be the edited essence of yourself. ~ Mel Brooks
Disappointment, when it involves neither shame nor loss, is as good as success; for it supplies as many images to the mind, and as many topics to the tongue. ~ Samuel Johnson, Letter to Hester Thrale, June 26, 1775
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. ~ George Orwell
There’s no disappointment in memory, and one’s exaggerations are always on the good side. ~ George Eliot
The Disappointment of Manhood succeeds to the delusion of Youth: let us hope that the heritage of Old Age is not Despair. ~ Benjamin Disraeli
I shall take all the troubles of the past, all the disappointments, all the headaches, and I shall pack them in a bag and throw them in the East River. ~ Trygve Lie
Reality is the name we give to our disappointments. ~ Mason Cooley
If I am to meet with a disappointment, the sooner I know it, the more of life I shall have to wear it off. ~ Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Page, July 15, 1763
Just Above Sunset 