Aleatory Quotes & Sayings

No good can come from beating ourselves up for falling down - for feeling unhappy when we want to feel just the opposite. — Toni Sorenson

There exists [a] word in German, Geschichte, which designates not accomplished history, but history in the present, doubtless determined in large part, yet only in part, by the already accomplished past; for a history which is present, which is living, is also open to a future that is uncertain, unforeseeable, not yet accomplished, and therefore aleatory. Living history obeys only a constant (not a law): the constant of class struggle. Marx did not use the term 'constant', which I have taken from Levi-Strauss, but an expression of genius: 'tendential law', capable of inflecting (but not contradicting) the primary tendential law, which means that a tendency does not possess the form or figure of linear law, but that it can bifurcate under the impact of an encounter with another tendency, and so on ad infinitum. At each intersection the tendency can take a path that is unforeseeable because it is aleatory. — Louis Althusser

Every Place where we feel safety is a Treasure.
Jan Jansen — Jan Jansen

Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. To say this is not to mystify the process of writing but to make an image out of the intense inner concentration the writer must have to cross the chasms of the aleatory and make them the word's own, as an explorer plants a flag. — Nadine Gordimer

Some people have questioned whether or not I can play a nice guy. Sometimes you can't win for losing. — Michael Chiklis

Mastery is not a function of I.Q. or natural talent or wealthy parents who can send you to the best school, but rather the result of going through a learning process, fueled by the desire to grow and the persistence to push past any obstacles. — Robert Greene

There's days when I'd love everybody to relize that things have gone too far, and we need to be born again ... but there are other days when I think the world deserves to be destroyed. Why should I help anybody? Everybody's stepped on me my whole life. — Marilyn Manson

The first model is Christian, founded on the idea that God wills proportional and harmonic inequalities among the social classes, all of whose members are entitled to at least sufficient living conditions. The second model is based on the erroneous idea that all inequality is unjust. — Plinio Correa De Oliveira

I have learned, as a rule of thumb, never to ask whether you can do something. Say, instead, that you are doing it. Then fasten your seat belt. The most remarkable things follow. — Julia Cameron

If you want something bad enough, never give up (and take a boost when offered). — Randy Pausch

We have a choice to make during our brief visit to this beautiful blue and green living planet: to hurt it or to help it. — Ray Anderson

Every man carries about him a touchstone, if he will make use of it, to distinguish substantial gold from superficial glitterings, truth from appearances. And indeed the use and benefit of this touchstone, which is natural reason, is spoiled and lost only by assumed prejudices, overweening presumption, and narrowing our minds. — John Locke

Saddam Hussein didn't kill 3,100 people on Sept. 11. Osama bin Laden did, and as far as we know he's still alive. — William J. Clinton

I put a sour cherry pastille on my tongue, but the combination jarred. A meaty, protein taste was called for. With a cool skin, sticky sweet fragrance in the nostrils, the aleatory drip of timeless water echoing in your ears, a limbo beyond the muscle spindles... you become a spiced mummy in a cool chamber beneath the Nile. This salt-surfeited breeze tingling every corpuscle of my skin set me adrift on a cool back eddy near a basser sea... but the wave lap and sibilance of the palm leaves was like the rustle of a costly veil... in what exotic world did a vortex of primary colours drain into the eyes?... did it all make me a taffeted plankter drinking substance from the spectrum of a fractured sun?"

-"Cancerous Kisses of Crocodiles — William Scott Home

...Marx was constrained to think within a horizon torn between the aleatory of the Encounter and the necessity of the Revolution. — Louis Althusser

If it's nice out, I swim pretty much every day for about half an hour. I have a great pool; it's very private and not too many people use it. — Yunjin Kim

The city lies at the galaxy's dust-stranded edge, enfolding a moon that used to be a world, or a world that used to be a moon; no one is certain anymore. In the mornings its skies are radiant with clouds like the plumage of a bird ever-rising, and in the evenings the stars scatter light across skies stitched and unstitched by the comings and goings of fire-winged starships. Its walls are made of metal the color of undyed silk, and its streets bloom with aleatory lights, small solemn symphonies, the occasional duel. — Yoon Ha Lee

I know this guy is a musician so I hope he can play us a tune that could get us the hell out of here. — Joe Teti

Whatever we say
We're always telling each other exactly what we want them to know ...
We are always telling each other
The truth
Even when
We're lying — Merrit Malloy

We come from a country that has made a fetish if not a virtue out of proving it can live without art: high, low, old, new, fat, lean, and particularly the rarely visible nocturnal art of poetry.
We must do something with our time on this small aleatory sphere for motives other than money. Power is not an acceptable surrogate. — C.D. Wright