Remy de Gourmont Quotes

As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

The human mind can appreciate the One only by seeing it first in the Many.

Reductionism is not the right viewpoint for everything, and it certainly won't explain the relationship between the brain and the mind. This is because of a feature known as emergence. When you put together large numbers of pieces and parts, the whole can become something greater than the sum.

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

The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realise that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent.

The totality of the psyche can never be grasped by the intellect alone.

All things are delicately interconnected.

We endeavor to stuff the universe into the gullet of an aphorism.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.

The Universal view melts things into a blur.

But even physics cannot be defined from an atomic topography.

It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.

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.

To describe an animal as a physico-chemical system of extreme complexityis no doubt perfectly correct, except that it misses out on the animalness of the animal.

To separate mind from body doesn't make any sense.

Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject.

We cannot see outside what we are not inside. The universe is to us what the huge engine is to the miniature engine; and indication of any error in the tiny engine leads us to imagine trouble in the huge one.

The deeper thought is, the taller it becomes.

Metaphysics is a cobweb that the mind weaves around things.

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

Reductionism is merciless.

The parts of the universe ... all are connected with each other in such a way that I think it to be impossible to understand any one without the whole.

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

All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for...There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre.

To understand the whole it is necessary to understand the parts. To understand the parts, it is necessary to understand the whole. Such is the circle of understanding.