"Paul Cilliers was a remarkable Renaissance man and one of the most important academics and Afrikaner intellectuals that this country has produced. I had the privilege of knowing him for close on thirty years as friend, colleague and soul mate with a shared love of ideas, music, food, social interaction and a burning interest in complexity and complex systems."

“It bears repetition that an argument against representation is not anti-scientific at all. It is merely an argument against a particular scientific strategy that assumes complexity can be reduced to specific features and then represented in a machine. Instead it is an argument for the appreciation of the nature of complexity, something that can perhaps be 'repeated' in a machine, should the machine itself be complex enough to cope with the distributed character of complexity.”

“Each element in the system is ignorant of the behaviour of the system as a whole, it responds only to information that is available to it locally... If each element 'knew' what was happening to the system as a whole, all of the complexity would have to be present in that element.”

“There is no over-arching theory of complexity that allows us to ignore the contingent aspects of complex systems. If something really is complex, it cannot by adequately described by means of a simple theory. Engaging with complexity entails engaging with specific complex systems. Despite this we can, at a very basic level, make general remarks concerning the conditions for complex behaviour and the dynamics of complex systems. Furthermore, I suggest that complex systems can be modelled.”

“At the heart of the matter... our technologies have become more powerful than our theories... We can do with technology what we cannot do with science.”

“The view from complexity claims that we cannot know complex things completely... modest positions are inescapable... We can increase the knowledge we have of a certain system, but this knowledge is limited... The fact that our knowledge is limited is not a disaster, it is a condition for knowledge. Limits enable knowledge.”

“The idea of ‘slowness’ became an important mantra for Paul: he wrote a widely cited paper on this topic. One of the popular newspaper columns he wrote for Die Burger was a letter to John Stuart Mill in which he described how he made the eating of an egg a quality event. He of course did not want to be prescriptive about how to eat eggs, but rather wanted to urge one to make every act in one’s daily life a quality act. This wish was fulfilled: if there is one thing I learned from him it was this principle, and so many others have expressed the same sentiment.”