Compound Complex Quotes & Sayings

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. — John Locke

Bookish people drolly claim to be addicted. I think, in some cases, this is literally true ... I suppose this makes me a small-time pusher, holding a couple of capsules of a novel compound, looking for vulnerable readers for whom it might turn out to be habit-forming. There's enough of them. When I walk into a bookshop
one of the big ones, a vast dispensary stacked with complex uppers and downers
I can't help thinking, my God, what army of junkies is all this feeding? — Henrietta Rose-Innes

During the Second World War, for example, Lieutenant Colonel Henry K. Beecher conducted a classic study of men with serious battlefield injuries. In the Cartesian view, the degree of injury ought to determine the degree of pain, rather like a dial controlling volume. Yet 58 percent of the men - men with compound fractures, gunshot wounds, torn limbs - reported only slight pain or no pain at all. Just 27 percent of the men felt enough pain to request pain medication, although such wounds routinely require narcotics in civilians. Clearly, something that was going on in their minds - Beecher thought they were overjoyed to have escaped alive from the battlefield - counteracted the signals sent by their injuries. Pain was becoming recognized as far more complex than a one-way transmission from injury to "ouch. — Atul Gawande

It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could have ever been present. But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, &c., present, that a proteine compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed. — Charles Darwin

The chemical compounds are comparable to a system of planets in that the atoms are held together by chemical affinity. They may be more or less numerous, simple or complex in composition, and in the constitution of the materials, they play the same role as Mars and Venus do in our planetary system, or the compound members such as our earth with its moon, or Jupiter with its satellites ... If in such a system a particle is replaced by one of different character, the equilibrium can persist, and then the new compound will exhibit properties similar to those shown by the original substance. — Jean-Baptiste Dumas

The text moves like a small crustacean with compound eye and complex nervous system; throbbing, involuted, it becomes a parasite on a different body, animal, using 'filiform protrusions through which it sucks the vital juices of its host.' Parasite or creature in mutation on the shore, torrid / delirium: mordant mortality, systematic competition the narrator against the I, leaking gas, a lapse of memory against a promise, an inset in a book. A muscular, involuntary bulging in the breast, circling all its inner surface: mesoblast: visceral. — Nicole Brossard