Quotes & Sayings About Patterns In History

Altogether forty-five Emperors had claimed the Spear of Destiny as their possession between the coronation in Rome of Charlemagne and the fall of the old German Empire exactly a thousand years later. And what a pagentry it was! THe Spear had passed like the very finger of destiny through the millenium forever creating new patterns of fate which had again and again changed the entire history of Europe ... According to the legend associated with the Spear of Longinus, the claimant to this talisman of power has a choice between the service of two opposing Spirits in the fulfilment of his world historic aims
a Good and an Evil Spirit. — Trevor Ravenscroft

One of the immutable patterns of history is the rise and fall of great powers. Those that survive are the ones that adapt as the world changes. — Stephen Kinzer

Meanwhile the doctor in Kaitaia had made known to the Education Dept the behaviour patterns of the Rusts in Te Hapua. The Dept always interfered in the private lives of teachers. Break up in marriage was not to be tolerated and an intervention of this authority forced the Rusts to report to Parawera School in the Waikato. — Theresa Sjoquist

While history never repeats itself, political patterns do. — Eric Alterman

This is the story I am working on. But it isn't complete as I don't have the right way to begin. I sit on the crosshouse floor and look at the objects. I see different ways they could be put together and the way the story changes over time. The objects fall into their groupings and they talk to each other in different fashions depending on where they're put and at first it makes me panic. I put the memories together again and again in their different patterns and try to understand which is the correct way. Then at last I see that there isn't one. I see that if I am lucky and do it right, the story will not ever come together in one final meaning. Because there is not yet any end. — Anna Smaill

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. — Ruth Benedict

It is impossible to determine precisely how many Victorians were dependent on the drug, but since millions used it on a daily basis, the number must have been considerable. The pallor of many women in the middle and upper classes, their frequent lack of appetite, their tendency to faint and to spend considerable time alone in dark rooms, the ornate patterns of overupholstered and overfurnished rooms, the persistently closed, thick draperies - these are evidence of a national dependency that the restraints of Victorian society discouraged anyone from discussing. — David Morrell

History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise,and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks: field-patterns, axe-heads, folk-tales, broken pitchers, burial mounds, the fading memory of their youthful beauty. History loves only those who dominate her: it is a relationship of mutual enslavement. — Salman Rushdie

If man were infinitely malleable, there would have been nor revolutions; there would have been no change because a culture would have succeeded in making man submit to its patterns without resistance. But man, being only relatively malleable, has always reacted with protest against conditions which made the disequilibrium between the social order and his human needs too drastic or unbearable. The attempt to reduce this disequilibrium and the need to establish a more acceptable and desirable solution is at the very core of the dynamism of the evolution of man in history. Man's protest arose not only because of material suffering; specifically human needs ... are an equally strong motivation for revolution and the dynamics of change. — Erich Fromm

Words, those precious gems of queer shape and gay colours, sharp angles and soft contours, shades of meaning laid one over the other down history, so that for those far back one must delve among the lost and lovely litter that strews the centuries. They arrange themselves in the most elegant odd patterns; the sound the strangest sweet euphonious notes; they flute and sing and taber, and disappear, like apparitions, with a curious perfume and a most melodious twang. — Rose Macaulay

I saw the patterns of history and thought that a human might be eighty per cent chemicals, eighteen per cent his past, and two per cent feeling, creatures of habit. Which makes psychiatrists really pharmacists who have to listen longer. — Gerard Donovan

There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.
If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.
What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.
There is no free will.
There are no variables. — Chuck Palahniuk

A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission. — Aminatta Forna

People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it. — Terry Pratchett

One of the tragic ironies of history is that such original and creative geniuses as Buddha and Jesus have been extolled as perfect patterns for all to emulate. In the very struggle to be like someone else rather than to be one's own true self, or to do one's own best in one's own environment, a child is in danger of losing the pearl that is really beyond price - the integrity of his (or her) own soul. — Sophia Lyon Fahs

We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia ... Going further back, we share a common ancestry with our fellow primates; and going still further back, we share a common ancestry with all other living creatures and plants down to the simplest microbe. The further back we go, the greater the difference from external appearances and behavior patterns which we observe today. — Fred Hoyle

Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history. — Jared Diamond

Since history is the drama of genius, its relentless surprise tempts us into designing boundaries for it, searching through it for patterns of repetition. Historians sometimes speak of trends, of cycles, of currents, of forces, as though they were describing natural events. In doing so they must dehistoricize themselves, taking a perspective from the timeless, believing that each observed history is always of others and never of themselves, that each observation is of history but not itself historical. — James P. Carse

Despite the fact we give hurricanes names like Katrina and Rita, a hurricane isn't a self-contained unit. A hurricane is an impermanent, ever-changing phenomenon arising out of a particular set of interacting conditions - air pressure, ground temperature, humidity, wind and so on. The same applies to us: we aren't self-contained units either. Like weather patterns, we are also an impermanent, ever-changing phenomenon arising out of a particular set of interacting conditions. Without food, water, air and shelter, we'd be dead. Without our genes, family, friends, social history, and culture, wouldn't act or feel as we do. — Kristin Neff

I think it's harder to avoid reflection on those larger patterns of history or society when they so insistently call into question your right to exist. — Garth Greenwell

In its quest to organize the world's information, Google has scoured vast troves of data to amass the greatest accumulation of information assets on the planet, including the billions of search queries on google and YouTube and the billions of interactions on Android, the dominant operating system for most mobile devices. Google also controls an ever-growing index of the world's websites and the browsing history of more than 2 billion users, three types of maps of the Earth's surface and traffic patterns, a real-time list of trending topics, the largest archive of discussions in Usenet groups, the entire contents of 20 million books, a huge collection of photographs, the largest collection of video on the planet, the largest online email repository, even the largest archive of DNA data. — Robert Tercek

What was going on here was that like so many people in contemporary society, along the way to gaining their superb educations, and their shiny opportunities, they had absorbed the wrong lessons. They had mastered formulas in calculus and chemistry. They had read great books and learned world history and become fluent in foreign languages. But they had had never formally been taught how to maximize their brains' potential or how to find meaning and happiness. Armed with iPhones and personal digital assistants, they had multitasked their way through a storm of resume-building experiences, often at the expense of actual ones. In their pursuit of high achievement, they had isolated themselves from their peers and loved ones and thus compromised the very support systems they so ardently needed. Repeatedly, I noticed these patterns in my own students, who often broke down under the tyranny of expectations we place on ourselves and those around us. — Shawn Achor

Searching for wisdom in historic events requires an act of faith - a belief in the existence of recurrent patterns waiting to be discovered. — Daniel Kahneman

The human race has the capacity to render itself extinct unless alternatives are found to the patterns of intraspecific warfare that have dominated civilized history. Ours has long been a predatory species. Living, for humans, depends upon the ability to kill as clearly as it does for lions or wolves. But lions and wolves, like almost all predatory species, normally limit their killing to prey animals, and they are equipped with elaborate ritual precautions to prevent the destruction of their own kind. Humans appear to be unique among predators in their enthusiasm to destroy members of their own species. Perhaps this unusual behavior can be attributed to some genetic deficiency which may lead humans ultimately to join the rest of nature's failures in the biological graveyard of extinction. Or perhaps our willingness to kill ourselves, like so many of our other problems, is something we have devised by misusing our enlarged brains. — Joseph W. Meeker

You might think it's better to prove to your reader that your book is unlike anything else out there - that this is a totally unique reading experience that doesn't have any similarity to any other story. I hate to break it to you, but that's a losing game. Even readers who think they only want to read 100% original fiction, totally unlike anything else that's ever been done before, are mistaken. The human mind is drawn like a magnet to established story patterns. That's why the "hero's journey" pattern of ancient myth has persisted throughout all of human history. — Libbie Hawker

Highly complex numbers like the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and Phi (sometimes called the Golden Proportion), are known as irrational numbers. They lie deep in the structure of the physical universe, and were seen by the Egyptians as the principles controlling creation, the principles by which matter is precipitated from the cosmic mind.

Today scientists recognize the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and the Golden Proportion as well as the closely related Fibonacci sequence are universal constants that describe complex patterns in astronomy, music and physics. ...

To the Egyptians these numbers were also the secret harmonies of the cosmos and they incorporated them as rhythms and proportions in the construction of their pyramids and temples. — Jonathan Black

It's not so much that history is simply cyclical, it seems to progress via recursive, repeated fractal patterns with minute variations. — Grant Morrison

History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern. — T. S. Eliot

I feel like I have been able to notice throughout the incremental march of history during the course of my own lifetime patterns emerging, and there's a sort of a rubber band effect that happens where social growth and change is concerned. — LeVar Burton

History is not a pattern-book of fossilized ideologies. — F. M. Powicke

And for a moment, he was tempted. In that hesitation between drawing breath and speaking, part of him wondered what would happen if he shed the patterns of history and spoke about himself as a man, about the Joe Miller who he'd known briefly, about the responsibility they all shared to tear down the images they held of one another and find — James S.A. Corey

[Pleasure is what suggested] which behaviors, emotions, social patterns and patterns of taste served us well during our evolutionary history. They were experienced as pleasures and encoded into our formative genetic codes ... deep in the past, from about 100,000 years ago and beyond. — Lionel Tiger

History is not "just one damn fact after another," as a cynic put it. There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating. — Jared Diamond

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, 'You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been'. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery. — Ashwin Sanghi

Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually know what this connection means for the kind of people they are becoming and for the kind of history-making in which they might take part. — C. Wright Mills

This would be the stuff of songs and paintings and patterns on skin. — Victoria Collins

History is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled. — Melvyn Bragg

Part of history is tracing artifacts and looking at patterns. — A.G. Riddle

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information. — Jorge Luis Borges

Social scientific research is and always will be tentative and imperfect. It does not claim to transform economics, sociology, and history into exact sciences. But by patiently searching for facts and patterns and calmly analyzing the economic, social, and political mechanisms that might explain them, it can inform democratic debate and focus attention on the right questions. It can help to redefine the terms of debate, unmask certain preconceived or fraudulent notions, and subject all positions to constant critical scrutiny. In my view, this is the role that intellectuals, including social scientists, should play, as citizens like any other but with the good fortune to have more time than others to devote themselves to study (and even to be paid for it - a signal privilege). — Thomas Piketty

Reade was an emancipating writer because he seemed to speak as man to man to resolve history into an intelligible pattern in which there was no need for miracles. Even if he was wrong, he was grown-up. — William Winwood Reade

And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any child ... even though it went against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight.
We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children: science, history, literature,
art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn't fought hard enough to pass on
the hardest-won truth of all: Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent. — Greg Egan

In my contemporary stories, I write about today's quilters, inventive techniques they use, and how technology has influenced their art. Novels set in the past let me have fun researching patterns that were popular and fabrics and tools available to quilters through history. — Jennifer Chiaverini

Old things climb out through my mouth and set themselves free in the air. On the high moor there are patterns and in my small mind there are patterns. [...] All the centuries drop away, and I am in the presence of something that does not know time. — Paul Kingsnorth

In the present age when communication is so rapid, we should create a different tradition, traditions are created everyday. Five years now is like 100 years before. We are living in a society that has no history. There's no precedent for this kind of society so we can break the old patterns. — Yoko Ono

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

[Writing about themselves] gives them wings, so that they can rise above the confounding maze of their lives and, from that perspective, begin to see the patterns and dead ends of their pasts, and a way out. That's the funny thing about mazes; what's baffling on the ground begins to make sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself. — Wally Lamb

The immense diversity of imagined realities that Sapiens invented, and the resulting diversity of behaviour patterns, are the main components of what we call 'cultures'. Once cultures appeared, they never ceased to change and develop, and these unstoppable alterations are what we call 'history'. — Yuval Noah Harari

Coca-Cola remains emblematic of the best and worst of America and Western civilization. The history of Coca-Cola is the often funny story of a group of men obsessed with putting a trivial soft drink "within an arm's reach of desire." But at the same time, it is a microcosm of American history. Coca-Cola grew up with the country, shaping and shaped by the times. The drink not only helped to alter consumption patterns, but attitudes toward leisure, work, advertising, sex, family life, and patriotism. — Mark Pendergrast

For most of the history of our species we were helpless to understand how nature works. We took every storm, drought, illness and comet personally. We created myths and spirits in an attempt to explain the patterns of nature. — Ann Druyan

Patterns repeat themselves in history — Rick Riordan

A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. — T. S. Eliot