Fritjof Capra Quotes

Nature can always be more complicated than we imagine.

Systems governed by only one set of rules are more vulnerable than those with variety.

A diverse ecosystem will also be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecological functions that can partially replace one another. When a particular species is destroyed by a severe disturbance so that a link in the network is broken, a diverse community will be able to survive and reorganize itself... In other words, the more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be.

I wish my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.

While some doubted that connecting the world was actually important, we were building. While others doubted that this would be sustainable, you were forming lasting connections. We just cared more about connecting the world than anyone else. And we still do today.

You have this enormous network and no one knows what's out there.

BitCoin is actually an exploit against network complexity. Not financial networks, or computer networks, or social networks. Networks themselves.

Not on one strand are all life's jewels strung.

Wherever the Net arises, there arises also a rebel to resist human control...A network nurtures small failures in order that large failures don't happen as often. It is...fertile ground for learning, adaptation, and evolution...The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network. All other topologies limit what can happen.

You have to realize the truth of biologist Julian Huxley's idea that 'Life is just one damn relatedness after another' "So you must have the models, and you must see the relatedness and the effects from the relatedness.

The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

It is with happiness as with watches: the less complicated, the less easily deranged.

This is the hallmark of a robust biological system: political parties can perish in a tragic accident and the society will still run, sometimes with little more than a hiccup to the system. It may be that for every strange clinical case in which brain damage leads to a bizarre change in behavior or perception, there are hundreds of cases in which parts of the brain are damaged with no detectable clinical sign.

The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.

No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.

The natural world is so adaptable...So adaptable you wonder what's natural.

An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile.

I am not immortal, but I've got a lot left in me yet.

When the sovereign spirit within us is true to nature, it stands poised and ready to adjust to every change in circumstances and to seize each new opportunity. It doesn't approach an object with prejudice or preconception, but handles each thing dispassionately before embracing it and, if necessary, finds advantage in what opposes it. It is like fire in this regard. Whereas a feeble flame might suffocate under a pile of dry sticks, a robust fire consumes everything it touches. The more objects of any kind heaped on it, the higher it rises, the hotter it burns.

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no definitive answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

Life is probably a tangle of love and hate permanently knotted together.

Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.

The whole of the world could be deduced from the smallest grain of sand, if one studied it closely enough.

A labyrinth, when it is big enough, is just the world.