complexity quotes

I believe that every one of us has a gift. And I believe that mine is the ability to take the complex and make it simple.

The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say, physics – greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.

I don’t think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

I think people inspire me the most. If I meet a person who is incredibly complex, and all of a sudden, I start thinking in rhymes, that person could be a muse.

Movies are not novels, and that’s why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can’t be done.

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

Money and investing can be complex, confusing, and often boring subjects.

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.

The more I grow in popularity, the lonelier it gets. Because you don’t really know me. You just know this part of me. You fell in love with that. But it’s way more intricate than what meets the surface.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Everybody’s got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

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.

If I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.

Power is a complicated word and can take many forms.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.

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.

Humanity is still advancing; and it will probably continue to advance for hundreds of thousands of years more, always on condition that we know how to keep the same line of advance as our ancestors towards ever greater consciousness and complexity.

Issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

People think, because we’re young, we aren’t complex, but that’s not true. We deal with life and love and broken hearts in the same way a woman a few years older might.

As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

Maleficent has suffered abuse in the past, and there’s a reason why she is now as furious as she is. And I think that children who have been outcast and abused in any way will relate to her. There’s a beautiful side to her; she’s not just a dark person. She has all these facets. And that is interesting.

The complexity of things – the things within things – just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

It’s a very confusing era that we’re in.

I think the depth, what children can handle and what they’re interested in, is much deeper than I think what people assume. I think it’s why sometimes we make things too simple for them.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

We live in a bewildering world.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

Women are considered deep – why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

Some formulas are too complex and I don’t want anything to do with them.

The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.

Everything in war is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult.

I get impatient with people working on a film that have their head in their hands like it’s the most complicated thing in the world.

Woman’s at best a contradiction still.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.

I’m not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Making a film is like putting out a fire with sieve. There are so many elements, and it gets so complicated.

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax.

Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.