Fritjof Capra Quotes

The Web is now philosophical engineering. Physics and the Web are both about the relationship between the small and the large.

We have to pay close attention to what we see, and be ready to work with the unexpected according to the basic principles of systems biology and medicine.

I think the next century will be the century of complexity.

One of the key insights of the systems approach has been the realization that the network is a pattern that is common to all life. Wherever we see life, we see networks.

If everything in the universe depends upon everything else in a fundamental way, it might be impossible to get close to a full solution by investigating parts of the problem in isolation.

Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.

In a broad systems sense, an organism's environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself.

It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts.

Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing ‘patterns of change’ rather than static ‘snapshots.’

Reductionism is merciless.

I love seeing things that work in the micro and work in the macro.

In the same way, the world is not the sum of all the things that are in it. It is the infinitely complex network of connections among them. As in the meanings of words, things take on meaning only in relationship to each other.

Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part by itself... We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts.

With the subsequent strong support from cybernetics , the concepts of systems thinking and systems theory became integral parts of the established scientific language, and led to numerous new methodologies and applications -- systems engineering, systems analysis, systems dynamics, and so on.

I believe that our very survival depends upon us becoming better systems thinkers.

Any study of a society shows that every solution creates a new situation which breeds its own new needs and problems, new demands.

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.

Anybody who has been in a relationship, raised a family, worked in business or been a systems analyst, you have to look at how the whole system works together. You have to find those opportunities to collaborate.

Our ancient yogis and sages were not just medical healers, but systems scientists and systems engineers, who saw the body and the universe as an interconnected engineering system, a system of systems that are governed by fundamental engineering systems principles.

In little localized pockets, the universe is capable of building some beautiful complexity.

[R]eductionism' is one of those things, like sin, that is only mentioned by people who are against it. To call oneself a reductionist will sound, in some circles, a bit like admitting to eating babies. But, just as nobody actually eats babies, so nobody is really a reductionist in any sense worth being against.

Chaos is hard to create, even on the Internet.

I think it needs to be with a heart-based wisdom and this heart-based wisdom needs to go hand in hand with science and with social activism and love for our planet and love for our whole human family that spans the whole globe and this may sound very high and mighty or airy-fairy, but it's going to have to go to that or else we're just all going to destroy each other.

Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge