Complexities Quotes

I write because I admire the act of rationalization, of seeking clarity in one's understanding of the complexities of life, and I'm bad at it. I'm slow. Writing, which is an arduous and slow process, proceeds at the same rate as my sloth-like mind. ~ Gregory Maguire

Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of emotion and observation, multilayered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers. Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language. It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious. It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings. It will not develop our awareness or add to the sum of our knowledge and intelligence. Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopaedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author's painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it. ~ Susan Hill

... her skills more akin to the baking of macaroons than solving the complexities of the universe. ~ Guy Portman

Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature's ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast mono-cultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain. ~ Michael Pollan

[John C.] Calhoun was a minority spokesman in a democracy, a particularist in an age of nationalism, a slaveholder in an age of advancing liberties, and an agrarian in a furiously capitalistic country. His weakness was to be inhumanly schematic and logical, which is only to say that he thought as he lived. His mind, in a sense, was too masterful - it imposed itself upon realities. The great human, emotional, moral complexities of the world escaped him because he had no private training for them, had not even the talent for friendship, in which he might have been schooled. It was easier for him to imagine, for example, that the South had produced upon its slave base a better culture than the North because he had no culture himself, only a quick and muscular mode of thought. It may stand as a token of Calhoun's place in the South's history that when he did find culture there, at Charleston, he wished a plague upon it. ~ Richard Hofstadter

Perhaps I am just a hopeless rationalist, but isn't fascination as comforting as solace? Isn't nature immeasurably more interesting for its complexities and its lack of conformity to our hopes? Isn't curiosity as wondrously and fundamentally human as compassion? ~ Stephen Jay Gould

The modern mind ... is interested above all in subtleties, equivocations and the subterranean complexities which dominate the average man and compose his life ... modern literature is concerned with the twilight, the passive rather than the active mind ... those undercurrents which flow beneath the apparently firm surface.
(Joyce to Arthur Power) ~ James Joyce

Trouble is one of the ways we discover the complexities Of the soul. ~ Terrance Hayes

Madame Bovary is timeless. It is not just about the female condition in France in the 1840s. It's not a simple cautionary tale. Emma is more than a character; she gives us an insight into human nature. With Emma, we are diving into the complexities of Flaubert's psyche. ~ Sophie Barthes

Time endorses the complexities of a zeigarnik mind! ~ Vishwanath S J

Mann's sexuality and his attitudes towards it are extremely complex - and the complexities are inherited in the figure of Aschenbach. Mann had lived through a series of (almost certainly unconsummated) relationships with young men. ~ Philip Kitcher

I have no aspiration here to reclaim mystery and paradox from whatever territory they might inhabit, for there is, indeed, often a killing in a kiss, a mercy in the slap that heats your face . . . There is, nevertheless, a particular poverty in those alloplasts who, addressing tragedy, seek to subdistinguish motives beyond those we have best, because nearest, at hand, and so it is with love and hate--emotions upon whose necks, whether wrung or wreathed, may be found the oldest fingerprints of man. A simple truth intrudes: the basic instincts of every man to every man are known. But who knows when or where or how? For the answers to such questions, summon Augurello, your personal jurisconsult and theological wiseacre, to teach you about primal reality and then to dispel those complexities and cabals you crouch behind in this sad, psychiatric century you call your own. It is the anti-labyrinths of the world that scare. Here is a story for you. Your chair. ~ Alexander Theroux

Sonnet XVII
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way than this:
where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep. ~ Pablo Neruda

So their combinations with themselves and with each other give rise to endless complexities, which anyone who is to give a likely account of reality must survey. ~ Plato

One of the problems with watching TV is that you've got a fairly low level of language operating all the time. Quite a small vocabulary and really no conceptual or abstract thinking. That's an issue. If you've got a wide vocabulary, you can learn. The complexities of grammar, in themselves, force you to think about time in a particular way. Force you to widen your outlook on the world. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Pakistan always seems to have a lot of political complexities and political challenges. But Pakistan is important for a number of reasons. Primarily, it is a nuclear power. And if, in fact, al Qaeda and Taliban, which are in Pakistan and causing a lot of tragedies and deaths in Pakistan - if they would ever somehow have real influence and control of that government, then we [world] really have a problem. ~ Dan Quayle

The job of the artist is not to resolve or beautify, but to hold complexities, to see and make clear. ~ Toi Derricotte

It would be very peculiar if a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complexities, learn quickly, and benefit from experience, did not have very important implications. ~ Hans Jurgen Eysenck

Don't run away from the world. The world is God. Don't run towards the world. God is the void. Don't be afraid of the complexities of this life, nor the stark simplicity of death. ~ Frederick Lenz

You see, programmers tend to be arrogant, self-absorbed introverts. We didn't get into this business because we like people. Most of us got into programming because we prefer to deeply focus on sterile minutia, juggle lots of concepts simultaneously, and in general prove to ourselves that we have brains the size of a planet, all while not having to interact with the messy complexities of other people. ~ Robert C. Martin

Free yourself from the complexities and drama of your life. Simplify. Look within. Within ourselves we all have the gifts and talents we need to fulfill the purpose we've been blessed with. ~ Steve Maraboli

'The Wine of Summer' is a beautiful film about love lost and found, and the complexities of life while discovering who you are. It was filmed primarily in and around Barcelona, and the imagery is breathtaking. ~ Kelsey Chow

Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love ... it had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things ... I just loved her. Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones
that kind of love. ~ Tim O'Brien

Complexities only happen when we are indecisive, dear child. ~ Cole McCade

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve. ~ W.B.Yeats

We would understand much more about life's complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time
on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations. ~ Jose Saramago

We have been seduced by sound bites. It is difficult to imagine how we are going to have an intelligent conversation around complex theopolitical issues as long as the average news consumer in America is willing to be sound-bite driven. We face a sorry state of affairs in our culture when few people seem willing to take the time for nuanced discussion on the complicated challenges we face. Politicians of all parties have been willing to foster this sound-bite mentality because it has worked for them. Most Americans work hard and are faced with too little time and too many distractions to study the issues well enough to make an informed judgment on them. As long as news consumers are willing to be manipulated by sound bites and are unwilling to commit the time to understand the complexities, we will continue to see artificial and simplistic distinctions drive too much of our conversation, resulting in divisions and disagreements that rarely get at the substantive issues. ~ Charles E. Gutenson

Better the complexities one thought he knew than the complexities which defied understanding. ~ Frank Herbert

Whether a man favors crepes and classical or cornbread and country, the complexities of life are all the same.
-The Rabbi- ~ J. Frank Dunkin

Q: What literary complexities do you find most interesting? That is, what do you like most to "solve," so to speak, as a novelist?
A: One wishes to create characters who will speak directly to the minds of comparative literature professors and intelligent book reviewers. ~ Gilbert Sorrentino

For centuries, cultures throughout the world have used indigenous technologies to navigate life's complexities. From navigator-priests in Micronesia to mystics in India, vast sums of knowledge are available if we but recognize it. ~ Elizabeth Kapu'uwailani Lindsey

Just the minute another person is drawn into some one's life, there begin to arise undreamed-of complexities, and from such a simple beginning as sexual desire we find built up such alarming yet familiar phenomena as fetes, divertissements, telephone conversations, arrangements, plans, sacrifices, train arrivals, meetings, appointments, tardiness, delays, marriages, dinners, small pets and animals, calumny, children, music lessons, yellow shades for the windows, evasions, lethargy, cigarettes, candies, repetition of stories and anecdotes, infidelity, ineptitude, incompatibility, bronchial trouble, and many others, all of which are entirely foreign to the original urge and way off the subject. ~ E.B. White

In all death penalty cases, spending time with clients is important. Developing the trust of clients is not only necessary to manage the complexities of the litigation & deal with the stress of a potential execution; it's also key to effective advocacy. A client's life often depends on his lawyer's ability to create a mitigation narrative that contextualizes his poor decisions or violent behavior. Uncovering things about someone's background that no one has previously discovered--things that might be hard to discuss but are critically important--requires trust. Getting someone to acknowledge he has been the victim of child sexual abuse, neglect, or abandonment won't happen without the kind of comfort that takes hours and multiple visits to develop. Talking about sports, TV, popular culture, or anything else the client wants to discuss is absolutely appropriate to building a relationship that makes effective work possible. ~ Bryan Stevenson

Every movie has its complexities and its challenges. ~ Simon Kinberg

Understanding God's Word is an essential ingredient of wisdom, which is the ability to apply God's truth to life's complexities. Having wisdom does not mean that you understand all of God's
ways; it means that you respond to life God's way (Deut. 29:29). The better you know the Bible, the wiser you will be and the more effectively you will deal with conflict. ~ Ken Sande

You want a better life? Simplify your life! Throw all the complexities from your life! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I am attracted to the complexities and deeper truths of characters, and I can't name a favourite role any more than I can name a favourite food! ~ Sharon Lawrence

To taste fully is to live fully. And to live fully is to be awake and responsive to complexities and truths
good and terrible, overwhelming and miniscule. To eat passionately is to allow the world in; there can be no hiding or sublimation when you're chewing a mouthful of food so good it makes you swoon. ~ Kate Christensen

So words play a very important part in our lives. Our life, it appears, is a network of complicated, interrelated words. Words have a great impact upon us, like 'god', 'democracy', 'freedom', 'totalitarianism'. These words conjure up familiar images. The words 'wife' and 'husband' are part of our everyday currency. But the word 'wife' is not actually the living person, with all her complexities and troubles. So the word is never the actual.

When the word becomes all-important, the living, the actual is neglected. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

What is the beauty of the haiku is that it is not simplistic. The beauty of the haiku I just said is very complex. It reaches all the complexities of our life on this Earth. Peace - that's a very complex idea, peace, so we can't get it as human beings. ~ Sonia Sanchez

I'm not a preacher, but I preach. I'm not a Buddhist, but I chant. I'm not race theorist, but I have questions and ponderances around the complexities of race and class and culture wherever I am. ~ Theaster Gates

... Our sunsets have been reduced to wavelengths and frequencies. The complexities of the universe have been shredded into mathematical equations. Even our self-worth as human beings has been destroyed. ~ Dan Brown

Monopoly belonged to me and Alex. It was our game and they would never understand. There were strategies and traditions and they would never get all its complexities.
I didn't want them to play it.
I strode to the Toy Department for another divider, thinking that I would never play Monopoly with anyone besides Alex, ever. Ever, ever, ever, ever.
It was possible I was behaving somewhat like a child. ~ Emmy Laybourne

But the point is, when the writer turns to address the reader, he or she must not only speak to me - naively dazzled and wholly enchanted by the complexities of the trickery, and thus all but incapable of any criticism, so that, indeed, he can claim, if he likes, priestly contact with the greater powers that, hurled at him by the muse, travel the parsecs from the Universe's furthest shoals, cleaving stars on the way, to shatter the specific moment and sizzle his brains in their pan, rattle his teeth in their sockets, make his muscles howl against his bones, and to galvanize his pen so the ink bubbles and blisters on the nib (nor would I hear her claim to such as other than a metaphor for the most profound truths of skill, craft, or mathematical and historical conjuration) - but she or he must also speak to my student, for whom it was an okay story, with just so much description. ~ Samuel R. Delany

Love is both hard and soft. It is the most believable truth and fiction. It is something we fight for and fight with. It is the yin and yang. It is the most contradictory of emotions, making you believe in both the extraordinary existence of heaven and scorches of hell. If you allow it, a saturation of complexities can destroy it and leave you desperately choking for the remnants, clawing for a miniscule flake of ash of what you had . True love is a rare miracle held in the highest veneration. Blessed are those who even come close its illumination. Only those who are selflessly brave can become victorious and claim this exceptional phenomenon, if just for a memory in time. ~ S.V.C. Ricketts

Like other ideologies, that of free trade contains unspoken contempt for the individual citizen. It is a despairing response to the complexities of the real world and the politics of despair always replace choice with inevitability. Indeed despair is the natural tone of economists when they are selling their theories of salvation. ~ John Ralston Saul

I found myself drawn to biology, with all its frustrating yet fascinating complexities. When I was twelve, I remember reading about axolotls, which are basically a species of salamander that has evolved to remain permanently in the aquatic larval stage. They manage to keep their gills (rather than trading them in for lungs, like salamanders or frogs) by shutting down metamorphosis and becoming sexually mature in the water. I was completely flabbergasted when I read that by simply giving these creatures the "metamorphosis hormone" (thyroid extract) you could make the axolotl revert back into the extinct, land-dwelling, gill-less adult ancestor that it had evolved from. You could go back in time, resurrecting a prehistoric animal that no longer exists anywhere on Earth. I also knew that for some mysterious reason adult salamanders don't regenerate amputated legs but the tadpoles do. My curiosity took me one step further, to the question of whether an axolotl - which is, after all, an "adult tadpole" - would retain its ability to regenerate a lost leg just as a modern frog tadpole does. And how many other axolotl-like beings exist on Earth, I wondered, that could be restored to their ancestral forms by simply giving them hormones? Could humans - who are after all apes that have evolved to retain many juvenile qualities - be made to revert to an ancestral form, perhaps something resembling Homo erectus, using the appropriate cocktail of hormones? My mind reeled out a stream of qu ~ V.S. Ramachandran

I don't have children of my own so I can't say I know the plight of being a parent, but I can kinda understand some of the complexities of it. ~ Joy Bryant

Justice came from a fight amid complexities, and required all the virtues in the world merely to be perceived. ~ Mark Helprin

When art is made new, we are made new with it. We have a sense of solidarity with our own time, and of psychic energies shared and redoubled, which is just about the most satisfying thing that life has to offer. 'If that is possible,' we say to ourselves, 'then everything is possible'; a new phase in the history of human awareness has been opened up, just as it opened up when people first read Dante, or first heard Bach's 48 preludes and fugues, or first learned from Hamlet and King Lear(/I> that the complexities and contradictions of human nature could be spelled out on the stage.

This being so, it is a great exasperation to come face to face with new art and not make anything of it. Stared down by something that we don't like, don't understand and can't believe in, we feel personally affronted, as if our identity as reasonably alert and responsive human beings had been called into question. We ought to be having a good time, and we aren't. More than that, an important part of life is being withheld from us; for if any one thing is certain in this world it is that art is there to help us live, and for no other reason. ~ John Russell

You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace. ~ Hermann Hesse

Seeing yourself reflected on screen is a very important part of being human. It makes us feel less alone, it make us feel more connected to humanity. Women, gay men, and trans people for a long time have not seen themselves represented, so being able to show the complexities that we all have - just as complex stories as a heterosexual white male - is crucial for us to feel more human and have other people see us as human beings. ~ Marielle Heller

I worry that track is going to enter into an impossibly complicated stage, where our understanding of the complexities of human physiology - and our ability to accentuate and exploit them - is going to make the notion of pure competition impossible. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

It would disappear forever from her memory of Lydia, the way memories of a lost loved one always smooth and simplify themselves, shedding complexities like scales. ~ Celeste Ng

The import is not the kind of work woman does, but rather the quality of the work she furnishes. She can give suffrage or the ballot no new quality, nor can she receive anything from it that will enhance her own quality. Her development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc., by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the meaning and substance of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free, will maker her a force hitherto unknown in the world, a force for real love, for peace, for harmony; a force of divine fire, of life-giving; a creator of free men and women.

from Woman Suffrage- 1910 ~ Emma Goldman

Literature ultimately helps one to ground a deeper and wider outlook. An over-directed life without the inner resource to step outside of itself is closed to other beauties and the complexities of character and world. ~ Gwee Li Sui

To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals
and critics of the Women's Movement. ~ Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

In the first stage of insight-building, all that researchers can do is observe phenomena. Second, they classify the phenomena in a way that helps them simplify the apparent complexities of the world so they can ignore the meaningless differences and draw connections between the things that really seem to matter. Third, based on the classification system, they propose a theory. The theory is a statement of what causes what and why, and under what circumstances. ~ Clayton Christensen

Photography has an amazing ability to capture the fine detail of surface textures. But far too often these intricate patterns are loved by the photographer for their own sake. The richness of texture fascinates the eye and the photographer falls easy prey to such quickly-caught complexities. The designs mean nothing in themselves and are merely pictorially attractive abstractions. A central problem in contemporary photography is to bring about a wider significance in purely textural imagery. ~ Arthur Tress

In many areas of understanding, none so much as in our understanding of God, we bump up against a simplicity so profound that we must assign complexities to it to comprehend it at all. It is mindful of how we paste decals to a sliding glass door to keep from bumping our nose against it. ~ Robert Breault

Let us never get so jaded by the complexities of life that we forget the sweetness, pureness, innocence of love at first bloom. ~ J. Autherine

The moral complexities of vampire-human love matches made my head hurt, so I did what I always did when confronted with such a moral problem: decided morals are for losers and the weak, and, thus, utterly irrevelant for me. ~ Harrison Geillor

Though Mrs. Gamely was by all measures prescientific and illiterate, she did know words. Where she got them was anyone's guess, but she certainly had them. Virginia speculated that the people on the north side of the lake, steeped in variations of English both tender and precise, had made with their language a tool with which to garden a perfect landscape. Those who are isolated in small settlements may not know of the complexities common to great cities, but their hearts are rich, and so words are generated and retained. Mrs. Gamely's vocabulary was enormous. She knew words no one had ever heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years. Virginia checked them in the Oxford dictionary, and found that (almost without exception) Mrs. Gamely's usage was flawlessly accurate. For instance, she spoke of certain kinds of dogs as Leviners. She called the areas near Quebec march-lands. She referred to diclesiums, linipoops, rapparees, dagswains, bronstrops, caroteels, opuntias, and soughs. She might describe something as patibulary, fremescent, pharisaic, Roxburghe, or glockamoid, and words like mormal, jeropigia, endosmic, mage, palmerin, thos, vituline, Turonian, galingale, comprodor, nox, gaskin, secotine, ogdoad, and pintulary fled from her lips in Pierian saltarellos. Their dictionary looked like a sow's ear, because Virginia spent inordinate proportions of her days racing through it, though when Mrs. Gamely was angry a staff of ~ Mark Helprin

The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his first day in Britain. ~ Bill Bryson

Power was unleashed by identifying that there is something worth fighting for, that there is purpose. There is a good. There is evil. And there are complexities to it, but that's the scope of who we are. What we strive to be is worthy. ~ Phil Szostak

Alcohol was the reason we formed complex civilizations, and having to deal with the complexities of civilization is the reason most of us need alcohol. ~ David Wong

Before my father would open up a karate school in a particular neighborhood, he'd clean up the block - kick all the drug dealers and gang bangers off the block. My father was very clear: 'I've got guns too, and I'll kill you just as much as a rival gang would.' And he meant it. He was a man of many facets and complexities. ~ Lupe Fiasco

We struggle with the complexities and avoid the simplicities. ~ Norman Vincent Peale

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil. ~ Azar Nafisi

Although I don't disagree that utterances express desires and try to make complexities precise, I actually don't think at all that any of our efforts to speak and mean things are ultimately why we speak. ~ Paul Fry

Enlightenment after all is to overcome delusion, by way of sensitizing practitioners to complexities and problems of the human situation. ~ Kim Hee-jin

The church has unfolded in many forms, and no one single external form stands alone as the CORRECT visible expression. As the church settled in various geographical areas and as it penetrated through a variety of cultures, it found expression in multifaceted forms. Thus, the insistence that the church must exist in a single form is a denial not only of the richness of creation, but also of the complexities of the human response. ~ Robert E. Webber

Summers was simply a master explainer, able to deftly boil down the complexities of economic and financial, and to put them in terms the non-expert could understand. He was brilliant at cultivating a sense of control, even as events spun far beyond what could be managed with any certainty. He could will into being the confidence that eluded others, those less self-assured and, maybe sensibly, on humbler terms with the world. ~ Ron Suskind

Your writing should be filled with simple complexities and complex simplicities. Because that is life. ~ Christy Hall

We can never change the story that made us what we are. It's a story accumulated by the manifold complexities-its capacity for astonishment and horror, for sanguinity and hopelessness, for pellucid light and the most profound darkness. We are what happened to us. And we carry everywhere all that has shaped us-all that we lacked, all that we wanted but never got; all that we got but never wanted; all that was found and lost. ~ Douglas Kennedy

For all their complexities, emotions exist for a very basic purpose: to initiate and maintain activities necessary for survival. In a nutshell, they modulate two drives that are absolutely essential to animal life, including human life: attachment and aversion. ~ Gabor Mate

The intellectual, i n my sense of the word , is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder,but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense , a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas,or ready-made cliches, or the smooth, ever-so accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwillingly, but actively willing to say so in public. This is not always a matter of being a critic of government policy, but rather of thinking of the intellectual vocation as maintaining a state of constant alertness, of a perpetual willingness not to let half-truths or received ideas steer one along. That this involves a steady realism, an almost athletic rational energy, and a complicated struggle to balance the problems of one's own selfhood against the demands of publishing and speaking out in the public sphere is what makes it an everlasting effort, constitutively unfinished and necessarily imperfect. Yet its invigorations and complexities, for me at least, make one the richer for it, even though it doesn't make one particularly popular. ~ Edward W. Said

If you want to understand the beauty of a bird, a fly, or a leaf, or a person with all his complexities, you have to give your whole attention which is awareness. And you can give your whole attention only when you care, which means that you really love to understand – then you give your whole heart and mind to find out. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

I leaned back in my chair, my fingers laced behind my head, and wondered at the complexities and contradictions that must have existed in the earth's original clay when God first scooped it up in His palms. ~ James Lee Burke

The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

[...] Like the God in whose image people are made, people are irreducible. There's always more to a person - more stories, more life, more complexities - than we know. The human person, when viewed properly, is unfathomable, incalculable, and dear. Perversion always says otherwise. ~ David Dark

I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper. ~ Brian Eno

Sometimes one should stop figuring out the complexities of the universe one should just free the slave - rjs ~ Rassool Jibraeel Snyman

Hink about the contradictions and complexities that beset people.
~ Bell Hooks

Science may have alleviated the miseries of disease and drudgery and provided an array of gadgetry for our entertainment and convenience, but it has left us in a world without wonder. Our sunsets have been reduced to wavelengths and frequencies. The complexities of the universe have been shredded into mathematical equations. Even our self-worth as human beings has been destroyed. Science proclaims that Planet Earth and its inhabitants are a meaningless speck in the grand scheme. A cosmic accident. ~ Dan Brown

There are so many devices that can receive video, creating complexities, because suddenly you can have a TV, laptop, smartphone, pads. And they are of different sizes. It's clear that you need to standardise and get a much more efficient TV delivery. ~ Hans Vestberg

Beauty and art pervade all the business of life like a kindly genius, brightly adorning our surroundings whether interior or exterior, mitigating the seriousness of existence and the complexities of the real life, extinguishing idleness in an entertaining fashion, and, where there is nothing good to be achieved, filling the place of vice better than vice itself. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

All this has been happening around them all the days of their lives though they couldn't see it, then one day, Prayer removes the veil and everything changes. Think of it this way: Picture a man whistling a tune, when out of nowhere, first a harmony joins, then another, and then suddenly he is taken up into a whirlwind of music, countless instruments playing soaring complexities that the man's whistling is, indeed, a part of, but now he begins to see how small a part; the longer he listens, he realizes that his is not the melody and where he had thought he was whistling alone, the truth had always been the music playing, though never before that moment heard, and now what had been noise becomes symphony. ~ Geoffrey Wood

Gideon was quickly checking through her muscular structure and then weaving very gently into the complexities of her reproductive system. Suddenly Legna cried out again, her hands hitting his chest and grabbing fistfuls of his shirt, her entire body trembling from head to toe. This time Gideon gave the reaction his full attention. He looked into her wide eyes, the pupils dilating as he watched. Her mouth formed a soft, silent circle of surprise.
"What are you doing?" she asked, her breath falling short and quick.
"Nothing," he insisted, his expression reflecting his baffled thoughts. "Merely continuing the exam. What are you feeling?"
Legna couldn't put the sensation into words. Her entire body felt as if it were pooling liquid fire, like magma dripping through her, centering under the hand he had just splayed over her lower belly. So, being the empath she was, she described it in the only way she could with any efficiency and effectiveness. She sent the sensations to him, deeply, firmly, without preparation or permission, exactly the way she had received them.
In an instant, Gideon went from being in control of a neutral examination to an internal thermonuclear flashpoint of arousal that literally took his breath away. His hand flexed on her belly, crushing the silk of her dress within his fist.
"Legna!" he cried hoarsely. "What are you doing?"
She didn't even seem aware of him, her eyes sliding closed and her head falling back as she tried to g ~ Jacquelyn Frank

In fact, when we listen to the church today, at least in the West, we are often left with impression that Christianity actually has very little to do with truth. Christianity is only about feeling better about ourselves, about leaping over our difficulties, about being more satisfied, about have better relationships, about getting on with our mothers-in-law, about understanding teenage rebellion, about coping with our unreasonable bosses, about finding greater sexual satisfaction, about getting rich, about receiving our own private miracles, and much else besides. It is about everything except truth. And yet this truth, personally embodied in Christ, gives us a place to stand in order to deal with the complexities of life, such as broken relations, teenage rebellion, and job insecurities. ~ David F. Wells

The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth. ~ Mortimer J. Adler

The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

All that makes earlier times seem simpler is our ignorance of their complexities. ~ Thomas Sowell

The very act of thinking about power in our lives and experiences creates a process of revelation and self-analysis that may even make us look at ourselves in a new light ... thinking about power and its complex manifestations may not simply lead to a better understanding of the abstract complexities of society, but may have an effect on one?s own image and identity. Perhaps a warning label should be placed on the cover ... ~ Kenneth E. Boulding

Views of women, on one side, as inwardly directed toward home and family and notions of men, on the other, as outwardly striving toward fame and fortune have resounded throughout literature and in the texts of history, biology, and psychology until they seem uncontestable. Such dichotomous views defy the complexities of individuals and stifle the potential for people to reveal different dimensions of themselves in various settings. ~ Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

I wasn't sure where to go from here. From the outside it seemed so straightforward. Leave, run away, start again. Julia had a lot going for her. She could have a whole new life. It clearly isn't this straightforward as there are thousands of women like Julia who don't leave or run away or start again. I would never really understand the complexities of Julia's violent relationship but one thing was very clear. When she said that Andy had nobody else, what she was really saying was that she didn't have anyone else. She was alone and, however difficult and abusive her relationship was, she clearly felt that it was all she had. ~ Benjamin Daniels

Linguists are no different from any other people who spend more than nineteen hours a day pondering the complexities of grammar and its relationship to practically everything else in order to prove that language is so inordinately complicated that it is impossible in principle for people to talk. ~ Ronald W. Langacker

In less than a year, the magic of being diagnosed had begun to wear off, and my bipolar disorder no longer felt like a story hook. It felt like a part of me I wasn't sure I wanted to sit with anymore. So the further away I got from the diagnosis and all that had led up to it, the more I downplayed the extremes or made them punchlines I could use before anybody else could. I came to resent the head tilts and looks of surprise that go hand in hand with sharing what I'd come to see as a particularly unglamorous part of my life. If this was what interesting was, I didn't want it anymore. I hadn't counted on the most interesting people not being able to opt out. I didn't want to be the woman who does everything despite her bipolar disorder. I wanted to be the woman who has many complexities, her bipolar disorder being just one of them. (You know, a person). ~ Anne T. Donahue

Life is simple when you embrace its complexities. ~ David R. Bernstein