#complex

The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features. ↗

— Roman Jakobson

#because #complex #different #distinctive #each

Usually, in romantic comedies, you end up sacrificing a great deal of the complexity - you know, just two attractive people and a good soundtrack. ↗

— Timothy Olyphant

#attractive people #comedies #complexity #deal #end

Expansion means complexity and complexity decay. ↗

— C. Northcote Parkinson

#decay #expansion #means

Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#apparently #both #cambridge #complex #difficult

The complex develops out of the simple. ↗

— Colin Wilson

#develops #out #simple

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

I know what cancer was. How is it like humankind?" Sek Hardeen's perfectly modulated, softly accented tones showed a hint of agitation. "We have spread out through the galaxy like cancer cells through a living body, Duré. We multiply without thought to the countless life forms that must die or be pushed aside so that we may breed and flourish. We eradicate competing forms of intelligent life. ↗

— Dan Simmons

#overpopulation #superiority-complex #intelligence

Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world. ↗

— Michael Denton

#biology #factory #id #intelligent-design #irreducible-complexity

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#life #love #science #sea #unity