Quotes About Patterns

Everything has happened before; if you know what comes before, then you know what happens now.

Human nature likes order; people find it hard to accept the notion of randomness. No matter what the laws of chance might tell us, we search for patterns among random events wherever they might occur—not only in the stock market but even in interpreting sporting phenomena.

Investment advisory services, earnings forecasts, and chart patterns are useless.

How men fear the chaos of the world, I thought, and the yawning eternity hereafter. So we build patterns to explain its terrible mysteries and reassure ourselves we are safe in this world and beyond.

Thinking you don't have unhealthy patterns is an unhealthy pattern in itself. And everyone has something unhealthy from their childhood. If you don't deal with it, it can ruin your life.

On the other hand, mere critical thinking, without creative and intuitive insights, without the search for new patterns, is sterile and doomed. To solve complex problems in changing circumstances requires the activity of both cerebral hemispheres: the path to the future lies through the corpus callosum.

In a way, science might be described as paranoid thinking applied to Nature: we are looking for natural conspiracies, for connections among apparently disparate data. Our objective is to abstract patterns from Nature (right-hemisphere thinking), but many proposed patterns do not in fact correspond to the data. Thus all proposed patterns must be subjected to the sieve of critical analysis (left-hemisphere thinking).

Humans are good, she knew, at discerning subtle patterns that are really there, but equally so at imagining them when they are altogether absent.

If we scrutinize 100,000 pictures, it's not surprising that occasionally we'll come upon something like a face. With our brains programmed for this from infancy, it would be amazing if we couldn't find one here and there.

The fact that atoms are composed of three kinds of elementary particles—protons, neutrons and electrons—is a comparatively recent finding. The neutron was not discovered until 1932. Modern physics and chemistry have reduced the complexity of the sensible world to an astonishing simplicity: three units put together in various patterns make, essentially, everything.

There is some evidence that dreaming is necessary. When people or other mammals are deprived of REM sleep (by awakening them as soon as the characteristic REM and EEG dream patterns emerge), the number of initiations of the dream state per night goes up, and, in severe cases, daytime hallucinations-that is, waking dreams-occur.

There is no doubt that right-hemisphere intuitive thinking may perceive patterns and connections too difficult for the left hemisphere; but it may also detect patterns where none exist. Skeptical and critical thinking is not a hallmark of the right hemisphere. And unalloyed right-hemisphere doctrines, particularly when they are invented during new and trying circumstances, may be erroneous or paranoid.

Humans were predictable creatures. They were prisoners of their own emotions, unable to prevent themselves from repeating the same mistakes over and over.

But here's some advice, boy. Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions.

People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.

When insane things start to arrange themselves in sane patterns around you, you know you got problems.

When insane things start to arrange themselves in sane patterns around you, you know you've got problems.

When insane things start to arrange themselves in sane patterns around you, you know you've got problems. It

I enjoyed decorating because I'd never gotten to do it before and I see things in structures and patterns, and decorating is a way of arranging things to achieve maximum visual happiness. If

I'm not really a fashion designer. I just love clothes. I've never been to design school. I can't sketch. I can't cut patterns and things. I can shorten things. I can make a dress out of a scarf.

a result, we are born pattern-spotters, seeing faces in the clouds, ghosts in the shadows, and mythical beasts in the stars. And we learn best when there are pictures to look at.

As a result, we are born pattern-spotters, seeing faces in the clouds, ghosts in the shadows, and mythical beasts in the stars.

Patterns cannot be weighed or measured. Patterns must be mapped.

Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.