Quotes About Surprise

Some economists became obsessed with market efficiency and others with market failure. Generally held to be members of opposite schools-"freshwater" and "saltwater," Chicago and Cambridge, liberal and conservative, Austrian and Keynesian-both sides share an essential economic vision. They see their discipline as successful insofar as it eliminates surprise-insofar, that is, as the inexorable workings of the machine override the initiatives of the human actors.

We begin with the proposition that capitalism is not chiefly an incentive system but an information system. We continue with the recognition, explained by the most powerful science of the epoch, that information is best defined as surprised-what we cannot predict rather than what we can. The key to economic growth is not acquisition of things by the pursuit of monetary rewards but the expansion of wealth through learning and discovery.

Novelties please less than they impress.

This was an easy matter with a man Oft in the wrong, and never on his guard; And even the wisest, do the best they can, Have moments, hours, and days, so unprepared, That you might 'brain them with their lady's fan;' And sometimes ladies hit exceeding hard, And fans turn into falchions in fair hands, And why and wherefore no one understands.

God's Word, wielded by the Holy Spirit, has the power to sort us out spiritually, to surprise and confront us, growing us in relationship with our Lord Christ. Thus, reading the Bible ought to at once be as encouraging as a mother's gentle touch and, at moments, as unsettling and disturbing as a violent storm.

Perhaps the safest prediction we can make about the future is that it will surprise us.

Mr S. got angry. 'Yes, I do have a son. He's a good-for-nothing. A dead loss.' I couldn't ask which prison he was in, so I put it more tactfully: 'What is he doing?' He sighed deeply: 'He's a professor of mathematics at London University.

I had the closest thing I have ever had to an out-of-body experience lying in bed one morning. I turned on the 'Today' programme and item four on the news was: 'The shadow chancellor has ruled himself out of the leadership.' I lay there thinking that's interesting, then I realised it was me.

If you think this has a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention.

trouble you're expecting never happens; it's always something that sneaks up the other way.

A day will come when you think yourself safe and happy, and suddenly your joy will turn to ashes in your mouth, and you'll know the debt is paid.

Once, I cut off a man's head, but he did not know it until he tried to brush his hair. Then it fell off.

Jay wondered how they'd feel the morning they all woke up and realized that somehow Camelot had turned into Mordor.

You took me unawares, my lord. I was not told of your coming." - "And I seem to have prevented yours.

Never do what they expect,

I should say something, but what? Pardon me, Father, but it's our brother she wants to marry?

Quentyn Martell almost laughed aloud. The gods are mad.

The Lord of Casterly Rock made such an impressive figure that it was a shock when his destrier dropped a load of dung right at the base of the throne.

He caught the first man in the back of the knee before they even knew he was there, and the heavy axehead split flesh and bone like rotten wood. Logs that bleed, Tyrion thought inanely as the second man came for him. Tyrion ducked under his sword, lashed out with the axe, the man reeled backward... and Catelyn Stark stepped up behind him and opened his throat. The horseman remembered an urgent engagement elsewhere and galloped off suddenly.

No more than he knew that the Beggar King would die young, or that Khal Drogo would follow him into the grave. Very little of what the fat man has anticipated has come to pass.

It was not like to win him back his lost honor, but the notion of keeping faith when they all expected betrayal amused him more than he could say.

He must have found that bastard under a cabbage leaf, then,

There's much to be said for taking people unawares. You never know what you might learn.

Expect nothing of Walder Frey, and you will never be surprised.