Quotes About Randomness

Does empathy depend on believing that but for the grace of God, or the randomness of the natural lottery, we could have been born with a different set of endowments?

To submit to chance is to reveal the self and its obsessions.

Events do not reflect God's choices. They happen at random, and randomness is another name for chaos… And chaos is evil; not wrong, not malevolent, but evil nonetheless.

These last few points are key to how quantum mechanics works, so let me summarize them: The wave represents the quantum state. When we leave the system alone, it changes in time deterministically, according to Rule 1. But the quantum state is only indirectly related to what we observe when we make a measurement, and that relation is not deterministic. The relation between the quantum state and what we observe is probabilistic. Randomness enters in a

To continue in atheism, I would need to believe that nothing produces everything, non-life produces life, randomness produces fine-tuning, chaos produces information, unconsciousness produces consciousness, and non-reason produces reason. I simply didn't have that much faith.

The themes of trauma—man's helplessness, the world's randomness, and ugly, unexpected death—are difficult ones for a person to express in art.

Often children would rather put together some made-up reasons for tragedies and feel guilty about these made-up causalties than experience the humiliation of being victims to the world's randomness.

Maybe that was the only real truth about the world, that there was no answer, that wisdom and experience were no better than a flat-out roll of the dice.

The Champions League is so difficult, It's like a lottery: sometimes you're just unlucky.

The name came about from me just closing my eyes and sticking a pen on a map of South Africa. St. Lucia was the fifth place that the pen landed on.

I listen to Radio 4 and put the iPod on shuffle. I like the randomness of, say, the Stones, then something from Nina Simone, Nick Drake or Bob Dylan.

Everybody always asks us how we choose the movies we have going right now, and it's hard to explain sometimes. There's a randomness to the way things kind of happen and get done. And sometimes you have this perfect storm, and you have to accept that and do the best you can.

Entropy gets in everywhere.

C'est folie, bien sûr, que de vouloir soumettre les événements, dans leur ordre aléatoire (et pareillement les humains, dans leur égoïsme naturel), aux règles de la logique ou du simple bon sens. Le monde ne tourne rond que pour les astronomes. Pour le commun des mortels, notre planète va au hasard, lamentable Nef des fous, subissant tour à tour la tempête ou la bonace, et ne trouvant aucun havre sur sa route.

when you leave it to chance, then all of a sudden you don't have any more luck.

I'm far less worried about whether I'm keeping up with what's trendy, and less embarrassed by the randomness of what I'm drawn to. I've also accepted that I'm never going to get to all the books I want to read in my lifetime, so I've come to peace with the rambling inanity of my whims.

At first the flow of thoughts rushes like a waterfall, which sometimes discourages beginners, who feel their mind is out of control. Actually, the sense of a torrent of thoughts seems to be due to paying close attention to our natural state, which Asian cultures dub "monkey mind," for its wildly frenetic randomness.

We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.

Chance alone is at the source of all novelty, all creation in the biosphere.

Feelings of depression; feelings of frustration; feelings of emptiness in the face of all this randomness - done down by the haphazard, yet again.

Now Sally plunged her abruptly into the full strangeness of this place, with its rot and randomness rooting towers taller than any in Tokyo, corporate obelisks that pierced the sooty lacework of overlapping domes.

Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.

It had acquired a name, Spatters, that reflected the desultory randomness of its outlines: the whole stinking shanty-town seemed to have dribbled like shit from the sky.

The final story of randomness—utter chaos—has not yet been told to us by the mathematicians. It seems remarkable that something so fundamental for probability theory has not been defined and even more remarkable that we can go so far in mathematics lacking a definition. By simply assuming randomness exists, mathematicians assign elementary probabilities to events, and that is their starting point. But they have not captured chaos and looked it in the eye.