#complex

The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle. ↗

— Michael Denton

#biology #chance #chemical-evolution #coincidence #id

You have a pet theory, one you have been turning over for years, that life itself is a kind of Rube Goldberg device, an extremely complicated machine designed to carry out the extremely simple task of constructing your soul. ↗

— Kevin Brockmeier

#life #rube-goldberg #soul #design

There are things that can be fixed with an apology and things that can't. ↗

— Otani Lovely Complex

#complex #forgiveness #lovely #forgiveness

Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#eye #mind #self-blinded #simple #life

For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#duality #joseph-conrad #writing-craft #life

Finally, I had held up examples of Goldhagen's inflammatory language and suggested that he had missed the essence of what Primo Levi once called the 'grey zone' of human affairs, described by the historian Christopher Browning as that foggy universe of mixed motives, conflicting emotions, personal priorities, reluctant choices, opportunism and accomodation, all wedded, when convenient, to self-deception and denial. I thought that by marshalling his research into an overly narrow narrative, painted without nuance in black and white, the author had missed the human complexity and the ordinariness of racism. ↗

— Erna Paris

#free-will #justice #racism #motivational

The brain isn't like the heart. They learned how to transplant a heart. The brain is more complex. ↗

— Adam Ant

#complex #heart #how #learned #like

If you ask me to summarise our mission, I would put it this way: We were a military regime that sought to lay the foundations for freedom and liberty in a complex society. ↗

— Ibrahim Babangida

#complex #foundations #freedom #his way #i

Can we please focus? We are supposed to be professionals." Holly said. "Not me!" said Orion cheerily, "I'm just a Teenager with hormones running wild and may I say, young fairy lady, they're running wild in your direction. ↗

— Eoin Colfer

#atlantis-complex #eoin-colfer #orion-fowl #focus

Sharpe is my favorite role of all that I've played. He's a very complex character. He knows that he's a good soldier, but he will always have to fight the prejudice of aristocratic officers because of his rough working-class upbringing. On the battlefield, he's full of confidence - but off it, he is unsure, a bit shy and ill at ease. ↗

— Sean Bean

#aristocratic #battlefield #because #bit #character