Fritjof Capra Quotes

What motivates me is the conviction that our problems are mainly a consequence of a lack of holistic understanding of the man-made system in which we are entwined.

The world is interconnected and causations run in many directions at once.

We are, first of all, not solitary creatures and second of all, we are deeply embedded in the lives of others. It's very easy to forget that and to engage in an atomistic fallacy - where we think that all we have to do is study the individual components of a system in order to understand the system.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.

All things are delicately interconnected.

One need not be eminent in any part of profound knowledge in order to understand it and to apply it. The various segments of the system of profound knowledge cannot be separated. They interact with each other. For example knowledge about psychology is incomplete without knowledge of variation.

You cannot know the body by studying the finger, and you cannot understand the universe by learning one science.

We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because 'two' is 'one and one.' We forget that we still have to make a study of 'and.'

All is connected... no one thing can change by itself.

This is what I tell my students: step outside of your tiny little world. Step inside of the tiny little world of somebody else. And then do it again and do it again and do it again. And suddenly, all these tiny little worlds, they come together in this complex web. And they build a big, complex world.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.

I don't believe you can reduce the world to a mathematical formula. I start with the world, assume it's complicated, and ask where can I get help from a whole range of disciplines.

The world has become so complex that the idea of a power in which everything comes together and can be controlled in a centralized way is now erroneous.

A corporation is organized as a system - it has this department, that department, that department... they don't have any meaning separately; they only can function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on.

Participatory complexity may well be the key descriptor of the 21st century - in our economies, in our politics, and in our everyday lives.

I have always had a tendency to keep enlarging problems which I personally think is the way the world works... that seeing anything one dimensionally on the kinds of political, sort of big issues of human progress is going to be a distorted view of things, which is why over my career I have gone seemingly from subject to subject to subject.

The traditional boundaries between politics, culture, technology, finance, national security, and ecology are disappearing. You cannot explain one without referring to them all.

There are so many intricacies to our brain that won't be understood unless we start to look at the system as a whole. All these different details don't operate in isolation.

You know nothing till you know all; which is the reason we never know any thing.

There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality.

In no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are imminent, not in some part, but in the system as a whole.

If we were to focus our attention on one particular problem and neglect the others, we would fail to see the true scope of our current global issues. The changes made in that form of thinking are limited and self-contained.

World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.