Quotes About Randomness

El destino es siempre desmedido: castiga un instante de distracción, el azar de tomar a la izquierda y no a la derecha, a veces con la muerte. BORGES citado por Bioy

La pregunta que nos asalta es: ¿sólo podemos escapar del determinismo gracias al azar de una vida sin sentido?

Si la vida de una persona está sujeta a sus circunstancias, sus memorias, sus aptitudes y sus tendencias, es difícil encontrar un espacio para la libertad, pues parece sometida a una estructura determinista. Pero si la persona, para tomar decisiones libres, pudiera ser insensible a su entorno y a su pasado, entonces viviría una vida sometida al azar. ¿Sería una vida basada en la libertad o más bien una existencia sumergida en el absurdo?

As Fama put it, "Life always has a fat tail.

This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next. It gave him the sensation that he was tottering on the tip of a flagpole. He was poised on circumstance.

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

It's human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation.

Un bourgeon, une feuille morte, la mort et la vie Le fruit du hasard, non, un principe établi

Entropy is a term from physics that refers to the amount of disorder in a system.

should be paid to the unlikelihood of

The rest of the universe is like the coin. The events of the past appear to cause the present, but every time we pop back into existence we are subject to a new set of probabilities. Literally anything can happen.

One of the most common questions writers are asked is Where do you get your ideas? But the sad truth is, we don't know. Ideas can come at any time and from any direction: in the shower, waiting for an elevator, or while bouncing across Wikipedia pages.

It is impossible for a Die, with such determin'd force and direction, not to fall on such determin'd side, only I don't know the force and direction which makes it fall on such determin'd side, and therefore I call it Chance, which is nothing but the want of art.

Individual events. Events beyond law. Events so numerous and so uncoordinated that, flaunting their freedom from formula, they yet fabricate firm form.

What's more, random events can mimic nonrandom ones. Even the most sophisticated scientists can have difficulty telling the difference between a real effect and a random fluke. Randomness can make placebos seem like miracle cures, or harmless compounds appear to be deadly poisons, and can even create subatomic particles out of nothing.

Her playing which had been superb became merely correct. It was necessary to suggest a certain sloppiness, the playing of something that hadn't been written. Computer-made music-synthesized Blue Moon- presented same problem. Random elements introduced.

I do not understand the capricious lewdness of a sleeping mind.

Life is a chance, a story is a chance. That I am here is a chance.

I think life would be so much funnier if every day you saw someone walking down the street getting hit in the head by a monkey.

I have a Woody Allen Jewish attitude to life: that it's all going to be disastrous. That it hasn't all been that way is simply down to some random quirk of fate.

In real life, good people die all the time and a**holes can live long and happy lives. It's a crapshoot.

A fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world; how it's liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

For the second time, the Ten-Count System had shown moderately heavy losses mixed with "lucky" streaks of the most dazzling brilliance. I learned later that this was a characteristic of a random series of favorable bets. And I would see it again and again in real life in both the gambling and the investment worlds.