Finding Patterns Quotes & Sayings

Since the birth control pill affects the menstrual cycle, it's not surprising that it may affect a woman's patterns of attraction as well. Scottish researcher Tony Little found women's assessment of men as potential husband material shifted if they were on the pill. Little thinks the social consequences of his finding may be immense: "Where a woman chooses her partner while she is on the Pill, and then comes off it to have a child, her hormone-driven preferences have changed and she may find she is married to the wrong kind of man. — Christopher Ryan

That's what life is: repetitive routines. It's a matter of finding the balance between deviating from those patterns and knowing when to repeat them. — Joseph Gordon-Levitt

The West Indian is not exactly hostile to change, but he is not much inclined to believe in it. This comes from a piece of wisdom that his climate of eternal summer teaches him. It is that, under all the parade of human effort and noise, today is like yesterday, and tomorrow will be like today; that existence is a wheel of recurring patterns from which no one escapes; that all anybody does in this life is live for a while and then die for good, without finding out much; and that therefore the idea is to take things easy and enjoy the passing time under the sun. The white people charging hopefully around the islands these days in the noon glare, making deals, bulldozing airstrips, hammering up hotels, laying out marinas, opening new banks, night clubs, and gift shops, are to him merely a passing plague. They have come before and gone before. — Herman Wouk

Perceiving how things are is a mode of exploring how things appear. How they appear is, however, an aspect of how they are. To explore appearance is thus to explore the environment, the world. To discover how things are, from how they appear, is to discover an order or pattern in their appearance. The process of perceiving, of finding out how things are, is a process of meeting the world; it is an activity of skillful exploration. — Alva Noe

Finding patterns is easy in any kind of data-rich environment; that's what mediocre gamblers do. The key is in determining whether the patterns represent noise or signal. — Nate Silver

The genius of the Gospel was that it included the problem inside the solution. The falling became the standing. The stumbling became the finding. The dying became the rising. The raft became the shore. The small self cannot see this very easily, because it doubts itself too much, is still too fragile, and is caught up in the tragedy of it all. It has not lived long enough to see the big patterns. No wonder so many of our young commit suicide. This is exactly why we need elders and those who can mirror life truthfully and foundationally for the young. Intimate I-Thou relationships are the greatest mirrors of all, so we dare not avoid them, but for the young they have perhaps not yet taken place at any depth, so young people are always very fragile. — Richard Rohr

Finding a name for something is a way of conjuring its existence, of making it possible for people to see a pattern where they didn't see anything before. — Howard Rheingold

Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning. — Michael Shermer

Perceiving the world as well designed and thus the product of a designer, and even seeing divine providence in the daily affairs of life, may be the product of a brain adapted to finding patterns in nature. (38) — Michael Shermer

Learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making do with fragmentary ones opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with patterns, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity. — Mary Catherine Bateson

Pattern-finding is the purpose of the mind and the construct of the universe. There are an infinite number of patterns, some of which are known; those still unknown hold the key to unresolved enigmas and paradoxes. — Agnes Denes

Creativeness is finding patterns where none exist. — Thomas M. Disch

Doing mathematics should always mean finding patterns and crafting beautiful and meaningful explanations. — Paul Lockhart

One of the most primal survival instincts the brain has is finding pattern and assigning meaning. When there is a breakdown, it will scramble to find those patterns again as quickly as possible. — Eileen Cook

For the next hour and a half he tried all the magic he could think of. He cast spells of remembering, spells of finding, spells of awakening, spells to concentrate the mind, spells to dispel nightmares and evil thoughts, spells to find patterns in chaos, spells to find a path when one was lost, spells of demystification, spells of discernment, spells to increase intelligence, spells to cure sickness and spells to repair a limb that is shattered. Some of the spells were long and complicated. Some were a single word. Some had to be said out loud. Some had only to be thought. Some had no words at all but consisted of a single gesture. Some were spells that Strange and Norrell had employed in some form or other every day for the last five years. Some had probably not been used for centuries. Some used a mirror; two used a tiny bead of blood from the magician's finger; and one used a candle and a piece of ribbon. But they all had this in common: they had no effect upon the King whatsoever. — Susanna Clarke

There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - these qualities you find always in that the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush of the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and in our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move towards death. — Frank Herbert

Your brain has an in-built mechanism for finding patterns you've programmed because of where you've put your attention. Solutions, innovations, and success come not from greater intelligence or creativity but from what we notice because of where we point those attributes — David Allen

Like an app straining for a song, data science is about finding patterns...to devise methods, structures, even shortcuts to find the signal amidst the noise. We're all looking for our own Parson's code. Something so simple and yet so powerful in a once-in-a-lifetime discovery, but luckily there are a lot of lifetimes out there. And for any problem that data science might face, this book ["Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us About Our Offline Selves"] has been my way to say: I like our odds. — Christian Rudder

We like to think we're superior to the people who, centuries ago, burned 'witches' for no better reason than a neighbor's belief that his crop failure or impotence was caused by that woman's action. But reporters are still prone to the same mental errors that caused these killings: seeing patterns where there are none, finding causes where there is only coincidence, ignoring our sources' political agendas and turning scanty evidence into panic. — John Stossel

Finding patterns is the essence of wisdom — Dennis Prager

Testing trading ideas is like digging for gold or looking for crude oil in deep waters. The more trading ideas you test, the better your chances of finding patterns that can be traded profitably. — Henrique M. Simoes

Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music and rhyme are a way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language. It's the reason Homeric bards sang their epic oral poems, the reason that the Torah is marked up with little musical notations, and the reason we teach kids the alphabet in a song and not as twenty-six individual letters. Song is the ultimate structuring device for language. — Joshua Foer

It is a scholar's task to find patterns in nature or cycles in history. Initially, it's no different from finding portraits of animals and heroes in the stars. The question is, Have you discovered a preexisting truth? Or have you imposed an arbitrary meaning on whatever it is you're considering? — Mary Doria Russell

The same economic relationship is at work underground, where low-density land-use patterns require greater lengths of pipe and conduit to distribute municipal services. This high ratio of public to private expenditure helps explain why suburban municipalities are finding that new growth fails to pay for itself at acceptable levels of taxation. — Andres Duany

Hurt people hurt people. That's how pain patterns gets passed on, generation after generation after generation. Break the chain today. Meet anger with sympathy, contempt with compassion, cruelty with kindness. Greet grimaces with smiles. Forgive and forget about finding fault. Love is the weapon of the future. — Yehuda Berg

Practicing discipline involves continually working to find space in our patterns, to find the gaps in the images we hold about ourselves. It also means finding the gaps in our ideas about others, releasing images that we hold about a manager, a coworker, a friend, or a partner. — Tsoknyi Rinpoche

Lost in the impossible pleasure of finding that soul and body that fits up perfectly to yours, lost in the starburst patterns that wait behind their eyelids when all that matters is that they are both here, now, for as long as they can be. — Kay Simone

What I love - and I'm a journalist - and what I love is finding hidden patterns; I love being a data detective. — David McCandless

Patternicity is the idea that humans are really talented at finding nonexistent patterns in random noise. — A. J. Jacobs

The assignment was a two-page essay, in Greek, on any epigram of Callimachus that we chose. I'd done only a page and I started to hurry through the rest in impatient and slightly dishonest fashion, writing out the English and translating word by word. It was something Julian asked us not to do. The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. — Donna Tartt

What made this project especially remarkable is that, among the many associations that are relevant to diet and disease, so many pointed to the same finding: people who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease. Even relatively small intakes of animal-based food were associated with adverse effects. People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease. These results could not be ignored. From the initial experimental animal studies on animal protein effects to this massive human study on dietary patterns, the findings proved to be consistent. The health implications of consuming either animal or plant-based nutrients were remarkably different. — T. Colin Campbell