Quotes About Randomness

Left to our own devices, we will notice some of the bad luck but overlook most of the dumb luck.

Luck exerts its influence between your decision and which of the possible paths you end up on. It is the element you have no control over that determines which of the possible outcomes you actually observe in the short run.

our brains evolved to create certainty and order. We are uncomfortable with the idea that luck plays a significant role in our lives. We recognize the existence of luck, but we resist the idea that, despite our best efforts, things might not work out the way we want. It feels better for us to imagine the world as an orderly place, where randomness does not wreak havoc and things are perfectly predictable.

In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my fact-less autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it's because I have nothing to say.

To the dumb question, 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, 'Why not?'

I think about terrorism in terms of popcorn. You can't tell which kernels are popcorn and which are not, but you assume you'll always have some kernels that are going to pop.

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

mundo cambia constantemente y no está regido por la necesidad, sino por el azar. Por el más insufrible, estúpido e inadmisible azar.

universo eterno y ordenado resulta mucho más consolador que esa atroz estupidez del ciego azar. Pero

Que el mundo no se rige por la necesidad, sino por el azar. Es ésta una sabiduría muy dolorosa, desde luego, porque supone admitir el sinsentido de la existencia. Bajo este punto de vista, todo, desde el sufrimiento hasta la heroicidad, no es más que un ciego capricho del universo, una broma colosal de la materia.

Success is like winning the sweepstakes or getting killed in an automobile crash. It always happens to somebody else.

odds don't matter. The natural world defies statistics.

In any random slaughter, the difference between living and dying rarely has anything to do with willpower, or wisdom, or pluck. It's just a matter of where you're standing. Two inches to the right, and the bus hits you. If your office is on the ninety-second floor instead of the ninetieth, you don't make it out in time.

All objects in the universe are unique. No two things that happen by chance ever happen in exactly the same way. No two things are ever constructed or manufactured in exactly the same way. No two things wear in exactly the same way. No two things ever break in exactly the same way.

Life is a rotten lottery.

Everything I've ever done in my life has been a fluke.

because no matter how we try to explain it—through religion or randomness, it doesn't matter—existence just doesn't seem to make any sense.

There is only chance in this world, chance and physics.

There is only chance in this world, chance and physics. Anyway

Luck doesn't shine her light on each of us equally. She is arbitrary, irrational, unfair, and sometimes downright cruel. There are people who spend their entire lives basking in her glow, and others never seem to get one goddamned break.

Life is a mess of accident, I find.

the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error. Even

I tratti del viso del figlio le parvero la quintessenza raffinata di un procedimento casuale: un'interminabile fila di coincidenze che convergevano in un punto focale.

Ahh, but the dice cannot read their own spots.