Melanie Chisholm Quotes

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

For my part, it was Greek to me.

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.

It is beyond my apprehension.

Do not imagine that these most difficult problems can be thoroughly understood by any one of us.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.

Everything is both simpler than we can imagine and more entangled than we can conceive.

You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers - you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance.

Although most of us are complacent in our assumption that science is gaining on the unknown, scientists are acknowledging that man's own brain is complex beyond any hope of complete understanding.

A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.

The last advance of reason is to recognize that it is surpassed by innumerable things; it is feeble if it cannot realize that.

I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.

Sometimes I feel like a beetle crawling through a fusion power plant. I can feel a certain amount, see a certain amount, but I sure as hell don't understand everything.

The truth is that everything causes everything else. We do not speak therefore of one thing causing another. There are no secrets. It's just we thought they said dead when they said bread.

There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.

All our knowledge - past, present, and future - is nothing compared to what we will never know.

My knowledge of the human psyche is as yet imperfect. Certain areas won't yield to computation.

If you analyse anything, you destroy it.

Do not crowd the understanding; it can comprehend so much and no more. A pint pot will not contain the measure of a quart.

There are things so deep and complex that only intuition can reach it in our stage of development as human beings.

An accident, a random change, in any delicate mechanism can hardly be expected to improve it. Poking a stick into the machinery of one's watch or one's radio set will seldom make it work better.

As known unknowns become known; unknown unknowns proliferate; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.

Most things don't work like they are supposed to work.

We should take comfort in two conjoined features of nature: first, that our world is incredibly strange and therefore supremely fascinating, second, that however bizarre and arcane our world might be, nature remains potentially comprehensible to the human mind.

We should not assume; however, that just because something is unexplainable by us, it is unexplainable.