Quotes About Probability

a distinction that philosophers have proposed between "epistemic" and "aleatory" uncertainty.

Luck enters into every contingency. You are a fool if you forget it -- and a greater fool if you count upon it.

Five sets is a kind of lottery. Anything can happen.

I had no wish to take any determined route on that stroll; I attempted, rather, a maximum latitude of probabilities in order not to wear out expectation with an obligatory anticipation of a single one of them. I was able, within the imperfect limits of possibility, to walk, as they say, at random. I accepted, without any conscious prejudice but that of avoiding the wider avenues and streets, the most obscure invitations of chance.

Babilonia no es otra cosa que un infinito juego de azares.

las pruebas de la muerte son estadísticas y nadie hay que no corra el albur de ser el primer inmortal

I calculated the possible responses. 52 percent probable: She'd nod knowingly, tap her pen against her pad, and make some vaguely disapproving noise. 46 percent: She'd nod knowingly, tap her pen against her pad, and make some vaguely approving noise. 2 percent: She'd nod knowingly, tap her pen against her pad, and howl like a coyote. I attributed that last possibility to a bug in my calculations.

There is a deep, ancient connection between gambling and divination.

Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer your approach to this certainty.

I have made a decision that in future, I will only take on movies that have a better than 75 per cent chance of being made, and that's not easy.

Your Excellency, I have no need of this hypothesis.

The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense reduced to calculus.

Probability theory is nothing more than common sense reduced to calculation. -1819

Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là

Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse.

The most important questions of life are indeed, for the most part, really only problems of probability.

Nobody can be lucky all the time, so when your luck deserts you in some fashion don't think you've been abandoned in your prime, but rather that you're saving up your ration.

Being human and investigating the affairs of the gods is an extreme version of being tone-deaf and talking about music, or having never served in the army and talking about warfare: we resemble amateurs trying to use arguments from probability based on opinions and conjecture to unearth the ideas of experts. Given

Another way to characterize it is that our chances of finding a habitable planet are roughly equal to the chances that Christopher Columbus, sailing east, would accidentally discover the Americas. It's not a question of if. It's only a question of when.

In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it.

The twin gods, Necessity and Chance, walked among the stars. What needed to be, was; what might be, sometimes was.

I'll wager there isn't a human being on earth who doesn't believe in luck, however rational they pretend to be in public life. In reality, most of human life is luck - and, of course, its darker, more prevalent opposite. One only has to live long enough to experience both.

You don't need a Ph.D. in mathematics to be a successful poker player.

La probabilidad de que se forme la vida a partir de la materia inanimada es una en 1040.000... Es lo suficientemente grande como para sepultar a Darwin y toda la teoría de la evolución. No hubo un caldo primigenio, ni en este planeta ni en ningún otro, y si los inicios de la vida no fueron al azar, debieron haber sido el producto de la inteligencia con propósito". Sir Fred Hoyle, profesor de astronomía de la Universidad de Cambridge.