“The whole, though larger than any of its parts, does not necessarily obscure their separate identities.”

Writing for the court, United States v. Powers, 307 U.S. 214 (1939)
Judicial opinions

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William O. Douglas 52
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States 1898–1980

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“A system is more than the sum of its parts; it is an indivisible whole. It loses its essential properties when it is taken apart. The elements of a system may themselves be systems, and every system may be part of a larger system.”

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“Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system's separate parts or any subassembly of the system's parts.”

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“The whole is simpler than its parts.”

Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) physicist

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Attributed

“It has been said: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts,”

Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) German psychologist

Source: Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935, p. 176
Context: Even these humble objects reveal that our reality is not a mere collocation of elemental facts, but consists of units in which no part exists by itself, where each part points beyond itself and implies a larger whole. Facts and significance cease to be two concepts belonging to different realms, since a fact is always a fact in an intrinsically coherent whole. We could solve no problem of organization by solving it for each point separately, one after the other; the solution had to come for the whole. Thus we see how the problem of significance is closely bound up with the problem of the relation between the whole and its parts. It has been said: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful.

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“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Aristotle (-384–-321 BC) Classical Greek philosopher, student of Plato and founder of Western philosophy
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