Quotes About Patterns

Searching for wisdom in historic events requires an act of faith—a belief in the existence of recurrent patterns waiting to be discovered.

In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.

We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all.

There are distinctive patterns in the errors people make. Systematic errors are known as biases, and they recur predictably in particular circumstances.... The availability of a diagnostic label for this bias--the halo effect--makes it easier to anticipate, recognize, and understand.

System 1 represents sets by averages, norms, and prototypes, not by sums. Each

Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.

on reasoning about patterns of causation. They are products of System 1. In 1944, at about the same

We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities (such as a sequence of six girls) appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone's intention. We

Schwartzman smiled, sharing his enthusiasm. When the morgue had installed a camera with a UV filter on a tripod for timed exposures to help her identify pre- and perimortem injury patterns under the skin, she'd been as excited as Roger was now. Of course, at the time she'd been surrounded by dead people in drawers, so she'd kept the excitement to herself.

Relationships are like wall paper patterns, you think your moving forward but your always caught in your own obsessions.

The Search for the Real Self is also about those with an impaired real self who are unable to accomplish the task of finding a fit with their environment, and are compelled to resort to self-destructive behavior patterns—evidence of a false self—that protect them from feeling "bad" at the cost of a meaningful and fulfilling life.

Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

Where had they all gone to, he often pondered; those threads he had once held together, how far had they scattered, some to break, others to weave into unknown patterns? The strange randomness of the world beguiled him, that randomness which never would, so long as the world lasted, give meaning to those choruses again.

All poems live or die in the concerted arrangement of syllables into patterns that are alternatively broken or reinforced. Wyatt taught me that." —James Longenbach

In counseling, we don't simply help people to change one thought; we help people to understand the pattern of their thinking – their mindsets.

Where we see the same faults followed regularly by the same misfortunes, we may reasonably think that if we could have known the first we might have avoided the others.

Being undivided, nature cannot be used against itself. We do not therefore consume it, or exhaust it. We simply rearrange our societal patterns in a way that reduces our ability to respond creatively to the existing patterns of spontaneity. That is, to use the societal expression, we create waste. Waste, of course, is by no means unnatural. The trash and garbage of a civilization do not befoul nature; they are nature-but in a form society no longer is able to exploit for its own ends.

The alternative attitudes toward nature can be characterized in a rough way by saying that the result of approaching nature as a hostile Other whose designs are basically inimical to our interests is the machine, while the result of learning to discipline ourselves to consist with the deepest discernable patterns of natural order is the garden.

I don't think there's a pattern anywhere - you are just making patterns, out of cowardice. I think people aren't good at all, they are cannibals, and when you get down to it no one cares about anyone else.

Patterns that Arthur knew, rough blobby shapes that were as familiar to him as the shapes of words, part of the furniture of his mind. For a few seconds he sat in stunned silence as the images rushed around his mind and tried to find somewhere to settle down and make sense...

At intervals along the walls the tiles gave way to large mosaics—simple angular patterns in bright colors. Trillian stopped and studied one of them but could not interpret any sense in them. She called to Zaphod. "Hey, have you any idea what these strange symbols are?" "I think they're just strange symbols of some kind," said Zaphod, hardly glancing back. Trillian shrugged and hurried after him.

If you're being bombarded with information, the act of looking for patterns – not necessarily finding them – is what going to give you psychic refuge, a sense of sanctuary.

Human beings are disgustingly predictable, and this is as true of psychopaths as it is of grandmothers.

Human nature is always interesting... And it's curious to see how certain types always tend to act in exactly the same way." - Miss Marple, The Herb of Death, Pg. 167