David Whyte Quotes

Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

People are looking for certainty. The more complex the world becomes, the more people look for people to give them certainty and tell them what to do. During the past few years of actively thinking about this, there is one thing that I have accepted: certainty is not out there. There is not one strategy to follow, and that's OK.

I don't know why we have to put things in boxes of superlatives. That isolates them. Life is fluid, and the minute you start trying to put a line around something, it will deceive you and go away.

The major problem for us in the 21st century is to be comfortable with ambiguity.

Keeping your lives as varied as possible is a good thing.

When you have large systems, it becomes almost impossible to make even very simple changes.

My worry is that the world is becoming more chaotic every day. My excitement is that more people paying attention to 'Less but better' could help solve our growing problems.

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity. To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see a solution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.

What is the alternative to understanding the complexity of the world?

The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.

It is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

The sun is simple. A sword is simple. A storm is simple. Behind everything simple is a huge tail of complicated.

I believe in no final solutions.

If what you're doing isn't working, change it.

We must strive to be like the moon

Chaos has come to be associated with the study of anything complex, but, in fact, the mathematical techniques are directly applicable only to simple systems that appear to be complex.

Making something simple is very difficult.

Intelligence is the handmaiden of flexibility and change.

John von Neumann draws attention to what seemed to him a contrast. He remarked that for simple mechanisms, it is often easier to describe how they work than what they do, while for more complicated mechanisms, it is usually the other way around.

[Hillary Clinton] is also smart, she talks to people, she hears, and she says, "OK, I need to update, we need some much bigger changes."

Intelligence complicates. Wisdom simplifies.

The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.

It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.