Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

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.

The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change.

Reductionism is merciless.

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.

I don't believe you can reduce the world to a mathematical formula. I start with the world, assume it's complicated, and ask where can I get help from a whole range of disciplines.

A view of nature as dense and nonlinear is at the core of our contemporary science. Process and order emerge subtly.

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.

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

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

We get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables.

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.

Life is chaotic and unpredictable. If a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it could cause people at the opposite end of the globe to watch a Discovery Channel special on butterflies

The connectedness of things is what the educator contemplates to the limit of his capacity. No human capacity is great enough to permit a vision of the world as simple, but if the educator does not aim at the vision no one else will, and the consequences are dire when no one does.

Phenomena intersect; to see but one is to see nothing.

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.

A natural hierarchy is simply an order of increasing wholeness, such as: particles to atoms to cells to organisms, or letters to words to sentences to paragraphs. The whole of one level becomes part of the whole of the next. In other words, natural hierarchies are composed of holons.

Nature's action is complex: and nothing is gained in the long run by pretending that it is simple, and trying to describe it in a series of elementary propositions.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

This is what I tell my students: step outside of your tiny little world. Step inside of the tiny little world of somebody else. And then do it again and do it again and do it again. And suddenly, all these tiny little worlds, they come together in this complex web. And they build a big, complex world.

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

The world has become so complex that the idea of a power in which everything comes together and can be controlled in a centralized way is now erroneous.

What motivates me is the conviction that our problems are mainly a consequence of a lack of holistic understanding of the man-made system in which we are entwined.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

There is an increasing awareness of the interrelatedness of things. We are becoming less prone to accept an immediate solution without questioning its larger implications.

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.