#complexity

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better. ↗

— Edsger Wybe DIJKSTRA

#elegance #simple #simplicity #virtue #education

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#art #complexity #writing #art

He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#artists #complexity #friendship #music #musicians

The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it. ↗

— Lord Palmerston

#politics #men

I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must not for that very reason infallibly be faulty. ↗

— Herman Melville

#human-nature #humanity #infallibility #nature

Sufficiently simple natural structures are predictable but uncontrollable, whereas sufficiently complex symbolic descriptions are controllable but unpredictable. ↗

— Howard Pattee

#philosophy #science #systems #nature

Government succeeds by failing. ↗

— L.K. Samuels

#complexity-science #economics #politics #science

The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic. ↗

— Kenneth Tynan

#became #complexity #critic #effort #had

I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style. ↗

— Ken Burns

#becomes #careful #complexity #composition #drama

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

#complexity #cumulative #evolution #existence #explaining