Donella Meadows Quotes

You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient.

I'm at my best in a messy, middle-of-the-road muddle.

I've learned how to function in chaos.

Things are always changing. Part of being successful here is being comfortable with not knowing what's going to happen.

Principally, I'll give anything a chance, only because the greatest challenges are the ones that you never see coming.

I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready.

The unexpected has happened so continually in my life that it has ceased to deserve the name.

There will be mistakes and there will be falters. There will be things that are not a part of your plan. See the challenges in your life and accept them and embrace them.

Sometimes you know about a job four months in advance. Sometimes you know about a job four days in advance. It's all different, and my thing is just to try to stay prepared. It's like being a boxer. You never know when you're going to get your next fight, so you have to just stay in shape, mentally and physically and creatively.

The most we can hope for is to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome. The ride is a lot more fun that way.

Let us keep the discoveries and indisputable measurements of physics. But ... A more complete study of the movements of the world will oblige us, little by little, to turn it upside down; in other words, to discover that if things hold and hold together, it is only by reason of complexity, from above.

When you don't know what to expect, prepare for the unexpected.

I'm not sure anyone's life turns out exactly the way they imagine. All we can do is to try to make the best of it. Even when it seems impossible.

I, and all the complex things around me, exist only because many things were assembled in a very precise way. The 'emergent' properties are not magical. They are really there and eventually they may start re-arranging the environments that generated them. But they don't exist 'in' the bits and pieces that made them; they emerge from the arrangement of those bits and pieces in very precise ways. And that is also true of the emergent entities known as "you" and "me".

Expect the unexpected.

The only thing constant in the world is change, that's why today I take life as it comes.

The business changes. The technology changes. The team changes. The team members change. The problem isn't change, per se, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is the inability to cope with change when it comes.

I was always willing to say, "Let's see what happens," when something came up that looked like it might help me get a little closer to where I wanted to be . . .

Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.

Not in his goals but in his transitions, man is great.

I'm not the type of person that just needs to feel concrete and like nothing's going to change. I revel in the change.

To feel the anguish of waiting for the next moment and of taking part in the complex current (of affairs) not knowing that we are headed toward ourselves, through millions of stone beings - of bird beings - of star beings - of microbe beings - of fountain beings toward ourselves.

I'm pretty mutable as a human being, period - if you put me on Pluto, I can figure it out.

Just go with it', he thought. 'You won't figure out anything if you give in to fear'.

As a speculator you must embrace disorder and chaos.