Quotes About Randomness

Me da la sensación —dijo—, de que en la vida humana la casualidad no se rige por el cálculo de probabilidades. Quiero decir con esto que nos ocurren muchas cosas casuales tan improbables que no podemos justificarlas matemáticamente.

I don't want to have a singular vision. I don't have that kind of discipline. I love the randomness of my life - how I have five, six, seven projects going on at one time.

There were no answers, just as there were no concrete connect-the-dot justifications of daily life's randomness: shit happens, deal with it, stop whining, take your medicine, grow the fuck up.

Why did the killer stalk the sorority girls in Black Christmas? Why was Regan possessed in The Exorcist? Why was the shark cruising around Amity? Where did Carrie White's powers come from? There were no answers, just as there were no concrete connect-the-dot justifications of daily life's randomness: shit happens, deal with it, stop whining, take your medicine, grow the fuck up.

Entropy can decrease. It's just ridiculously unlikely.

the universe, according to quantum mechanics, participates in a game of chance.

Human nature likes order; people find it hard to accept the notion of randomness. No matter what the laws of chance might tell us, we search for patterns among random events wherever they might occur—not only in the stock market but even in interpreting sporting phenomena.

There are meaningful deaths. And there are absurd and utterly meaningless deaths. Unfortunately, you don't get to choose which one you get.

The philosopher Didactylos has summed up an alternative hypothesis as Things just happen. What the hell.

How much of your life had been happenstance? How much of your life had been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky? But then, weren't all lives that way? Who could say, in the end, that they had chosen any of it?

randomness and lack of warning are the attributes of human violence we fear most, but you now know that human violence is rarely random and rarely without warning.

Life is governed by chance, not wisdom.

???? ?? ?????? ??? ???? ???????? ???????. You can see from that, Croesus, that man is entirely a creature of chance" (Trans. de Sélincourt)

Weit hinten in irgend einer Nasenhöhle hatte der Zufall aus Schleim eine zweistimmige Panflöte geformt, der wir gezwungen waren zu lauschen.

Csakhogy egy ilyen város mindig kitermeli az álmatlanjait; maga is álmatlan szervezÅ'dés, örökké éneklÅ' vezetékekkel; sok millió lakója között mindig akadnak olyanok, akik kifelé bámulnak az ablakon; nem pedig alszanak, mint szoktak. És minden éjjel mások. Hogy most éppen Å', és nem más, az merÅ' véletlen.

I don't believe that if you do good, good things will happen. Everything is completely accidental and random. Sometimes bad things happen to very good people and sometimes good things happen to bad people. But at least if you try to do good things, then you're spending your time doing something worthwhile.

determinism does not imply predictability.

At such small scales, space and time might seethe and roil at random. They might fluctuate like bubbling foam.

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.

It would be frightening to think that in all the cosmos, which is so harmonious, so complete and equal to itself, that only human life is happening randomly, that only one's destiny lacks meaning.

Es wäre entsetzlich, glauben zu müssen, daß in diesem ganzen so harmonishen, vollkommenen und sich selbst immer gleichbleibenden Kosmos nur die menschliche Existenz ein Speil des Zufalls und nur das Schicksal des Menschen völlig sinnlos sei.

You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.

There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.

To me, chance isn't random. The universe is bound by unseen threads. We have only to untangle them a little to see a pattern unfold.