Quotes About Patterns

All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people's, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak are the unlucky, and the stupid.

All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people's, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.

This is the pre-verbal language that linguists call Mentalese. Hardly a language, more a matrix of shifting patterns, consolidating and compressing meaning in fractions of a second, and blending it inseparably with its distinctive emotional hue. ... So that when a flash of red streaks in across his left peripheral vision ... it already has the quality of an idea ... unexpected and dangerous, but entirely his, and not of the world beyond himself.

Music rhythms are mathematical patterns. When you hear a song and your body starts moving with it, your body is doing math. The kids in their parents' garage practicing to be a band may not realize it, but they're also practicing math.

Design, whether it's on your body or in your home, is the same thing. It's mixing different colors, different textures, and unexpected patterns - elements that you wouldn't often put together in an interesting way.

If you take your thumb and your index finger and look right where they meet - go ahead and do that now - and relax your hand, you'll see a crinkle, and then a wrinkle within the crinkle, and a crinkle within the wrinkle. Right? Your body is covered with fractals.

Many people and governments share the mistaken belief that science, with new, ingenious devices and techniques, can rescue us from the troubles we face without our having to mend our ways and change our patterns of activity. This is not so.

If Trump keeps learning, he could become a big asset. He will shatter the traditional patterns.

I do make a conscious effort to not repeat old patterns, instead of being like, But they don't want me! I haven't always been that way.

She was thinking about how a mind could turn to stone, the patterns solid and immovable in the face of seemingly unbearable pressures, and the way dust trickled down faint as whispers, unnoticed by any.

It was a conceit to imagine that they knew the world; that they knew its every detail. Forces ever worked unseen, in elusive patterns no mortal mind could comprehend.

Outside, in the street beyond the two motionless Wickan guards, Gamet paused and looked up. Ancient light, is it? If so, then the patterns I see... May have died long ago. No, that does not bear thinking about. It is one of those truths that have no value, for it offers nothing but dislocation.

Words were numbers were codes were formulae. Words held secret maps, the measuring of paces, the patterns of mortal minds, of histories, of cities, of continents and warrens.

The lesson of history is that no one learns.

Whenever some aspect of nature doesn't care about direction, circles are bound to appear.

In colloquial usage, chaos means a state of total disorder. In its technical sense, however, chaos refers to a state that only appears random, but is actually generated by nonrandom laws. As such, it occupies an unfamiliar middle ground between order and disorder. It looks erratic superficially, yet it contains cryptic patterns and is governed by rigid rules. It's predictable in the short run but unpredictable in the long run. And it never repeats itself: Its behavior is nonperiodic.

things that seem hopelessly random and unpredictable when viewed in isolation often turn out to be lawful and predictable when viewed in aggregate.

When a guitar string is plucked or when children jiggle a jump rope, the shape that appears is a sine wave. The ripples on a pond, the ridges of sand dunes, the stripes of a zebra—all are manifestations of nature's most basic mechanism of pattern formation: the emergence of sinusoidal structure from a background of bland uniformity.

Not my job to judge, boy." Baba Yaga filled and lit the pipe again. "But I do observe that its difficult to escape familiar patterns. When you live your life with cruel words, you look for people to give them to you. When you escape and evil stepmother, you take an uncaring bride. When your father throws you out, you love someone who won't love you back. And to keep yourself in cruelty, you're willing to risk head and hands on the mayors side board. Keep the pattern going. Hm.

Without knowing the full extent of the past, we have no idea whether the events we can see are typical of larger patterns or simply contingent products of particular eras, societies, or conjunctures. A statistician might say that the sample from which historians generalize is seriously skewed for the simple reason that we have no idea how or by how much it is skewed! If that is true, it makes all the larger generalizations of historians suspect.

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

If we don't have to change self-destructive or wasteful patterns, we won't. But basically we are resourceful creatures, and if we can tolerate deprivation and fear, we can also change and learn how to have more healthy behavior and different values.

The strands (the gods) weave out of our mortal lives are like a pattern visible only from the heavens; we here on earth can only guess at their designs

Words spun patterns in Varencienne's mind, but she knew she had to be careful.