Hidden Complexity Quotes

We try to solve very complicated problems without letting people know how complicated the problem was.

You never knew about people, like you never knew how deep a pond was because all you saw was the top.

There is more going on beneath the surface than we think, and more going on in little, finite moments of time than we would guess.

I want to appear ordinary, but I have it understood that I am not.

Because - Bobby Lewis said this once to us in class, the better you get, the less credit you'll get. Because the better you are, the more it looks like walking and talking and everybody thinks they can walk and talk.

Any explanation or logic that explains everything so easily has a hidden trap in it. I'm speaking from experience. Somebody once said if it's something a single book can explain, it's not worth having explained. What I mean is don't leap to any conclusions.

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

I feel that it's lovely when, as a user, you're not aware of the complexity.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood; and if there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last closet, he must feel, was never opened; there is always a residuum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes that he has a greater possibility.

I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.

Life resembles Gobelin tapestry; you do not see the canvass on the right side; but when you turn it, the threads are visible.

Nature has the deep cunning which hides itself under the appearance of openness, so that simple people think they can see through her quite well, and all the while she is secretly preparing a refutation of their confident prophecies.

The best engineer a few decades ago was someone who could create the most beautiful beam or structure; today it's to do a structure you cannot see or understand how it's done. It disappears and you can talk only about color, symbols, and light. It's an aesthetic of miracle.

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. ... It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wilderness lies in wait.

There is always more in one of Ramanujan's formulae than meets the eye, as anyone who sets to work to verify those which look the easiest will soon discover. In some the interest lies very deep, in others comparatively near the surface; but there is not one which is not curious and entertaining.

People think I'm laid back, but there's a lot going on in my head.

Life forms a surface that acts as if it could not be otherwise, but under its skin things are pounding and pulsing.

We say 'forest' but this word is made of the unknown, the unfamiliar, the unencompassed. The earth. Clods of dirt. Pebbles. On a clear day you rest among ordinary, everyday things that have been familiar to you since childhood, grass, bushes, a dog (or a cat), a chair, but that changes when you realize that every object is an enormous army, an inexhaustible swarm.

She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

It's harder that in looks," I told him when I finally got back in the car. "Most things are.

Never think of the surface except as an extension of a volume.

She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.

Whenever things sound easy, it turns out there's one part you didn't hear.

Just imagine the banner headlines if a marine biologist were to discover a species of dolphin that wove large, intricately meshed fishing nets, twenty dolphin-lengths in diameter! Yet we take a spider web for granted, as a nuisance in the house rather than as one of the wonders of the world. And think of the furore if Jane Goodall returned from Gombe stream with photographs of wild chimpanzees building their own houses, well roofed and insulated, of painstakingly selected stones neatly bonded and mortared! Yet caddis larvae, who do precisely that, command only passing interest.

Smooth and ordered on the outside; roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath, but not noticeably so, never noticeably so.