Quotes About Contingency

If you have enough fantasies, you're ready, in the event that something happens.

Your first choice doesn't come through, so you come and find me, your back-up plan.

This was all the more dangerous in that my nature has always made me more open to the world of the possible than to that of real-life contingencies. This approach helps one to understand the human soul, but one runs the risk of being deceived by individuals.

Worst-case scenarios are often low-probability events. They're even less likely to happen if you strategize how to prevent them from happening, and how you'd deal with them if they did.

Freedom is the recognition of contingency.

Save a boyfriend for a rainy dayand another, in case it doesn't rain.

Un nano non lancia mai la sua arma se non ne ha un'altra!

THIS, therefore, is also essentially necessary and wholesome for Christians to know: That God foreknows nothing by contingency, but that He foresees, purposes, and does all things according to His immutable, eternal, and infallible will.

THIS, therefore, is also essentially necessary and wholesome for Christians to know: That God foreknows nothing by contingency, but that He foresees, purposes, and does all things according to His immutable, eternal, and infallible will. By this thunderbolt, "Free-will" is thrown prostrate, and utterly dashed to pieces.

There is a kinship between the concepts of nature and radical contingency.

The contingency of the future, which accounts for the violent acts of those in power, by the same token deprives these acts of all legitimacy, or equally legitimates the violence of their opponents. The right of the opposition is exactly equal to the right of those in power.

The instability of levels produces not only the intellectual experience of disorder, but the vital experience of giddiness and nausea, which is the awareness of our own contingency and the horror with which it fills us.

We can elaborate a valid concept of Nature only if we find something at the jointure of Being and Nothingness. Despite what Bergson says, there is a kinship between the concept of Nature and radical contingency. In order to elaborate this concept, we have to leave positivism or negativism, which maintains a separation between the objective and the subjective, and which thus makes impossible the subjective-objective that Nature will always be.

History is not made in advance...It depends on the will and audacity of men upon occasion, and...it contains an element of contingency and risk.

It is only afterwards, once human invention has reintegrated them in the meaning of the totality, that the hazards of history can appear to be and are in fact rational without there being any place for the assumption of a hidden reason which orients them through the "ruse" of appearing in the guise of contingency.

Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution.

Anglo-American analytic philosophy is a deliberate retreat into a universe of thought where contingency, ambiguity, and the concrete have no place.

The idea of institution is precisely the foundation of a personal history on the basis of contingency.

Human existence is the change of contingency into necessity through the act of taking up. All that we are, we are on the basis of a factual situation that we make our own and that we ceaselessly transform through a sort of escape which is never an unconditioned freedom.

But a perfect meritocracy banishes all sense of gift or grace. It diminishes our capacity to see ourselves as sharing a common fate. It leaves little room for the solidarity that can arise when we reflect on the contingency of our talents and fortunes. This is what makes merit a kind of tyranny, or unjust rule.

For why do the successful owe anything to the less advantaged members of society? The answer to this question depends on recognizing that for all our striving, we are not self-made and self-sufficient. Finding ourselves in a society that prices our talents is our good fortune, not our due. A lively sense of the contingency of our lot can inspire a certain humility.

management is based on the psychological theory of operant conditioning. It emphasizes the need for concrete and immediate reinforcements, such as housing or a gift card, in exchange for good behavior, including abstinence, work, and compliance with psychiatric medicines. Contingency management swaps one set of rewards, such as meth and heroin, for another set of rewards, such as gift cards and apartment units.

everything was obvious in retrospect. They even had a name for it: "hindsight bias." It referred to the difficulty of remembering how little you knew at the time, how uncertain things were, before they all played out. Even wildly contingent events looked inevitable in retrospect. But they weren't. And it's actually psychologically difficult to imagine not knowing back then what you know now.

It was then that Ella realized she had no mother who'd search for her in this way. She was surprised by how bitterly she felt this lack-for a contingency that would never occur.