Understanding Complexity Quotes

Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.

The Premier League is really nice, it's wonderful. It is also quite difficult to explain certain things. You need to experience them personally to take it all in.

I am conscious of my inability to grasp, in all its details and positive developments, any very large portion of human knowledge.

I think, like, fiction has a place to understand those things that are hardest to understand that non-fiction can't ever get at.

What is the alternative to understanding the complexity of the world?

it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.

The ability of nonintelligent people to understand the most complicated mechanisms and to use them has always been to me a cause of astonishment: their inability to understand simple questions is even more astonishing. The general acceptance of simple ideas is difficult and rare, and yet it is only when simple, fundamental, ideas have been accepted that further progress becomes possible on a higher level.

That was kind of scary. You got the sense as a little kid that you might be at risk now, and then you're like, 'Why are we at risk? It's because my grandfather is in charge of all of this.' You can't really realize the magnitude of a job like that when you are eight.

I was always a little adult. Even as a little kid, I just couldn't understand why I was surrounded by all these kids. I took things very seriously.

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

The point came when people were doing things I didn't feel competent to do myself. I'm not being modest; I honestly get lost. I was lucky in spotting what I did when I did, but there comes a point where you realise what you're doing is not going to be much good.

There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world -- its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles. The more you understand, the more you look, the greater is your enjoyment of life and your sense of peace. That's all there is to it. Everything else is fun and games. If an activity is not grounded in "to love" or "to learn" it does not have value.

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

I'm not big on reading directions. I can't do that. I'm just not from that world.

It's something I've noticed with my two children - children frequently know and don't know at the same time. They are aware of aspects of the world that are a little bit shadowy, and they choose not to engage with them.

Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.

If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.

Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.

You have to know the weeds - to have lived in them - to delegate. I wouldn't want to be a leader who had never lived in the weeds.

Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings.

People seem to be afraid of science, and certainly, people seem to be afraid of mathematics. And I think that's such a shame, because I don't think it's as hard as people seem to think it is.