David > David's Quotes

“If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.”
― Ian Stewart, The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World

“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

“The more elaborate his labyrinths, the further from the Sun his face.”
― Mikhail Naimy, The Book of Mirdad: The strange story of a monastery which was once called The Ark

“All you can do is hope for a pattern to emerge, and sometimes it never does. Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

“Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.”
― Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

“Hierarchical organization in biological systems thus is characterized by an exquisite array of delicately and intricately interlocked order, steadily increasing in level and complexity and thereby giving rise neogenetically to emergent properties.”
― Clifford Grobstein