Quotes & Sayings About Randomness

People believe the only alternative to randomness is intelligent design. — Richard Dawkins

It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life - with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make. — Daniel Kahneman

Luck is not as random as you think.
Before that lottery ticket won the jackpot, someone had to buy it. — Vera Nazarian

Finally, spurred by the appetite to which he was indifferent, he took any one, read the printing on the parti-colored label of paper. He held the soup can like a skull; and at once he did not want it. The soup was made from celery. Mr. Lecky put it back. He stood in mild misery, harassed again by the plague of a will impotent in its restored freedom.
If the mind cannot direct, it can be cunning to protect its ease. Mr. Lecky now proposed a fantastic pact to himself. He shut his eyes. He reached again and took a can. Eyes still shut, he ripped the label from it, crumpled and threw away the paper. Now he could not tell what he had until he opened it. — James Gould Cozzens

My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence, on top of the numerous legends about faces of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or Mother Teresa, being seen on slices of toast, or pizzas, or patches of damp on a wall. This eagerness is enhanced if the pattern departs from randomness in the specific direction of being symmetrical. — Richard Dawkins

Life had taught him to be profoundly suspicious of coincidence, and it had similarly taught him to view any seemingly random conjunction of events or persons as coincidence and thus be suspicious of that, as well. — Donna Leon

Genetic randomness had already determined how much talent I'd been allotted, and destiny's randomness would account for my share of luck. The only piece I had any control over was my discipline. Recognizing that, it seemed like the best plan would be to work my ass off. That was the only card I had to play, so I played it hard. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Two moral forces shaped how we think and live in this shining twentieth century: the Virgin, and the Dynamo. The Dynamo represents the desire to know; the Virgin represents the freedom not to know.

What's the Virgin made of? Things that we think are silly, mostly. The peculiar logic of dreams, or the inexplicable stirring we feel when we look on someone that's beautiful not in a way that we all agree is beautiful, but the unique way in which a single person is. The Virgin is faith and mysticism; miracle and instinct; art and randomness.

On the other hand, you have the Dynamo: the unstoppable engine. It finds the logic behind a seeming miracle and explains that miracle away; it finds the order in randomness to which we're blind; it takes the caliper to a young woman's head and quantifies her beauty in terms of pleasing mathematical ratios; it accounts for the secret stirring you felt by discoursing at length on the nervous systems of animals. — Dexter Palmer

Expose yourself to as much randomness as possible. — Ben Casnocha

She opened the door within two seconds of his pressing the doorbell, letting out a stream of cats that ran around with such rapidity and randomness of motion that they assumed a liquid state of furry purringness. The exact quantity could have been as low as three or as high as one hundred eight; no one could ever tell as they were all so dangerously hyperactive. — Jasper Fforde

I've always been a pretty good researcher, said Bronwyn modestly.
Oh, so that we share, thought Myfanwy, but you didn't inherit the power to make people shit themselves. You've got to love the randomness of genetics. — Daniel O'Malley

Time is a random thing. It is the thing that makes us older. Humans use it to organize the world. They have invented a system to try to make order from randomness. The other humans, all of them but me, live their lives by hours and minutes and days and seconds, but those things are nothing. The universe would laugh at our attempts to organize it, if it could be bothered to notice them.
Time is the thing that makes our bodies shrivel and decay. That is why people are scared of it. — Emily Barr

(Q: From an outsider's perspective, what you call "chaos magick" has a lot of rules, discipline, and order involved, and doesn't seem very chaotic at all. What would you say to such a person?)
A: I differentiate sternly between Chaos and Entropy. Only highly ordered and structured systems can display complex creative and unpredictable behaviour, and then only if they have the capacity to act with a degree of freedom and randomness. Systems which lack structure and organisation usually fail to produce anything much, they just tend to drift down the entropy gradient. This applies both to people and to organisations. — Peter J. Carroll

And like the randomness of life's chaos, the decision to let him live was a coin toss. Just as she currently fought to get out from under the weight of her decision to allow Kate Breeden to live, so she might also one day again find herself in Lumani's crosshairs.
All she could do was walk the narrow line between instinct and conscience and hope for the best. — Taylor Stevens

I began to imagine orchestration where before I heard only the cacophony of randomness. Crazy people do that all the time, unless you buy into the notion that we have the ability to perceive order and connotation in ways closed off to the minds of "sane" people. I don't. Subscribe to that notion, I mean. We are not gifted. We are not magical. We are slightly or profoundly broken. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

We can store patterns and conclusions in our heads, but we cannot store randomness itself. Randomness is a concept that defies categorization; by definition, it comes out of nowhere and can't be anticipated. While we intellectually accept that it exists, our brains can't completely grasp it, so it has less impact on our consciousness than things we can see, measure, — Anonymous

The most frightening proposition was that he had no connection to this place, that this fourth-floor office was simply where be broke down. If his presence here was random, then why not an entire world governed by randomness, with all that implied? Solve the Straggler, and you took a nibble out of the pure chaos the world had become. — Colson Whitehead

We try to see patterns, to judge the events in our lives as rewards or punishment, parse things into good and evil. But there is a randomness to life that is beyond analysis... — William Eisner

For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world. — Stanislaw Lem

We all start from "naive realism," i.e., the doctrine that things
are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones
are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the
greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of
snow are not the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and
the coldness of snow that we know in our own experience, but
something very different — Bertrand Russell

The point is that if you think you can pinpoint the cause, then you can fool yourself into thinking you can avert the cause. It's deeply egotistical. It's life played as a grand insurance policy. Our myth-making around cancer stems from the same impulse. Because we don't know exactly why most of it happens, we weave a makeshift wisdom around it, a false prophet, which seeps into the common story and feeds our hunger to understand why. The guilt is a byproduct, a way to assign blame and seek absolution. It's a lesser evil than the forces of randomness. And it gives us the illusion of control. — Alanna Mitchell

We all experience many freakish and unexpected events - you have to be open to suffering a little. The philosopher Schopenhauer talked about how out of the randomness, there is an apparent intention in the fate of an individual that can be glimpsed later on. When you are an old guy, you can look back, and maybe this rambling life has some through-line. Others can see it better sometimes. But when you glimpse it yourself, you see it more clearly than anyone. — Viggo Mortensen

What he likes most about proprietary trading is that it requires considerably less time than other high-paying professions; in other words it is perfectly compatible with his non-middle-class work ethic. Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drowning in randomness; work ethics, Nero believes, draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns - in short, being fooled by randomness. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The world is governed by chance. Randomness stalks us every day of our lives. — Paul Auster

No, human. I don't know shit about this. I'm just rattling off randomness to confuse you."

Xypher — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can't. — Jonathan Gottschall

Randomness and lack of warning are the attributes of human violence we fear most, but you now know that human violence is rarely random and rarely without warning. — Gavin De Becker

Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word. Perhaps our gut feeling that it cannot be so reflects only our hopes and prejudices, our desperate striving to make sense of a complex and confusing world, and not the ways of nature. — Stephen Jay Gould

Chaos theory, a more recent invention, is equally fertile ground for those with a bent for abusing sense. It is unfortunately named, for 'chaos' implies randomness. Chaos in the technical sense is not random at all. It is completely determined, but it depends hugely, in strangely hard-to-predict ways, on tiny differences in initial conditions. — Richard Dawkins

Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make. — Douglas Coupland

I think you've got to accept that certain things are in process that you can't change, that you can't overwhelm. The chaos of our cities, the randomness of our lives, the unpredictability of where you're going to be in ten years from now - all of those things are weighing on us, and yet there is a certain glimmer of control. If you act a certain way, and talk a certain way, you're going to draw certain forces to you. — Frank Gehry

What feeling feels like over time. An attempt to screw up what feeling feels like over time. Heartbreak and a high C ... The often welcome melodic lie ... The soul's undersong. The orchestration of randomness, a flirtation with the boundaries of silence and space ... a reminder that the self wants to disappear, be taken away from itself and returned. — Stephen Dunn

We choose to believe in Ma'at. We create order out of chaos, beauty out of ugly randomness. That's what Egypt is all about. — Rick Riordan

If my brain can ttell the difference between noise and signal, my heart cannot. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

EVEN RANDOMNESS IS WITHIN A SET OF PARAMETERS; THRESHOLDS ... — Clyde DeSouza

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being. — Madeleine L'Engle

Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy. — Barry Hannah

With randomness it is very unlikely to be embarrassed, but even if you get embarrassed, you can't replicate it. — Carl Pomerance

Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It was our use of probability theory as logic that has enabled us to do so easily what was impossible for those who thought of probability as a physical phenomenon associated with "randomness". Quite the opposite; we have thought of probability distributions as carriers of information. — Edwin Thompson Jaynes

In the midst of the ubiquitous dealings with prostituted signs, the thing-poem was capable of opening up the prospect of returning to credible experiences of meaning. It did this by tying language to the gold standard of what things themselves communicate. Where randomness is disabled, authority should shine forth. — Peter Sloterdijk

What if she was meant to be, or could have been, someone important in my life? I think that's what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by. How do you know ... I felt that by walking away I was abandoning [them], that I spent my entire life, day after day, abandoning people. — Peter Cameron

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over! — Aneurin Bevan

I still don't understand why the tag of 'action hero' follows me. My films have all these elements - romance, action and comedy. None of the fight sequences of my character is an act of randomness. There's a reason to action in my films. — Sunny Deol

We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We are at a time when postmodernism defies certainty, truth, and meaning; when spiritualism dabbles in quantum theory; and when randomness has become the order of the day. Isn't it ironic that at the same time, the world is on the edge of financial bankruptcy because we have conducted our financial affairs in a random fashion, as if there are no absolutes? — Ravi Zacharias

She thought of the boy's features as an exquisite distillation out of random patterns-endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus. — Frank Herbert

The world is big in some ways, and so small in others. — Ashly Lorenzana

Life is a chain of happenings that are either purely random or predestined. — Steven Redhead

Clearly, an open mind is a necessity when dealing with randomness. Popper believed that any idea of Utopia is necessarily closed owing to the fact that it chokes its own refutations. The simple notion of a good model for society that cannot be left open for falsification is totalitarian. I learned from Popper, in addition to the difference between an open and a closed society, that between an open and a closed mind. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

There (is) order and even great beauty in what looks like total chaos. If we look closely enough at the randomness around us, patterns will start to emerge. — Aaron Sorkin

But imagination is so often no match for the absurdity, the randomness, the tragedy of reality. — Leila Sales

The illusion that humans possess free will is compounded by the inherent randomness of the universe. Chaos disguised as freedom of choice ... — Henry Lindell

Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about. — John Polkinghorne

This turns out not to be true. Darwinian change is inevitable in any system of information transmission so long as there is some lumpiness in the things transmitted, some fidelity of transmission and a degree of randomness, or trial and error, in innovation. To say that culture 'evolves' is not metaphorical. — Matt Ridley

Looking at the doctrine of Darwinism, which undergirded my atheism for so many years, it didn't take me long to conclude that it was simply too far-fetched to be credible. I realized that if I were to embrace Darwinism and its underlying premise of naturalism, I would have to believe that: 1. Nothing produces everything 2. Non-life produces life 3. Randomness produces fine-tuning 4. Chaos produces information 5. Unconsciousness produces consciousness 6. Non-reason produces reason ... The central pillars of evolutionary theory quickly rotted away when exposed to scrutiny. — Lee Strobel

The best poetry has its roots in the subconscious to a great degree. Youth, naivety, reliance on instinct more than learning and method, a sense of freedom and play, even trust in randomness, is necessary to the making of a poem. — May Swenson

The terror of it was in the randomness. The brutality and the senseless way they chose their victims, while leaving so many witnesses to spread the fear. No one was safe. No one was ever safe. — Marissa Meyer

Then there is the cosmologist, who views himself as nothing but a manipulation of atoms; his mind configured out of randomness into the tool a vast, blind universe might use to perceive itself. If this is so then truly "all is vanity". What could be more pleasing to the cosmic narcissist than to gaze eternally with a billion eyes into the mirror that is himself? What fault, however, if certain eyes ultimately don't like what they see? — Dan Garfat-Pratt

He had a particular facination with the I Ching, that art of tossing three coins three times and divining a pattern out of heads and tails. Pete would begin with questions:
What determined the pattern? Was it random? Was it a higher power? Was is mathematical? Wasn't poker based on mathematical probability and not just luck? Did that mean randomness was actually mathematical? And if the I Ching was governed by mathematics, hey, wouldn't that mean the I Ching was actually predictable, a prescribed answer? And if it was prescribed, did that mean that your life followed the I Ching, like some sort of equation? Or did the I Ching simply capture correctly what had already been determined as the next series of events in your life? — Amy Tan

Real randomness requires an infinite amount of information. — Tristan Perich

So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness. — Sidney Poitier

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. — William Gibson

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. — China Mieville

What people fear most about tragedy is its randomness - a taxi cab jumps the curb and hits a pedestrian, a gun misfires and kills a bystander. Better to have some rational cause and effect between incident and injury. And if cause and effect aren't possible, better that there at least be some reward for all the suffering. — Jeffrey Kluger

Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all. — Wally Lamb

We could not, for example, arrive at a principle like that of entropy without introducing some additional principle, such as randomness, to this topography. — Michael Polanyi

Western man has tried for too many centuries to fool himself that he lives in a rational world. No. There's a story about a man who, while walking along the street, was almost hit on the head and killed by an enormous falling beam. This was his moment of realization that he did not live in a rational world but a world in which men's lives can be cut off by a random blow on the head, and the discovery shook him so deeply that he was impelled to leave his wife and children, who were the major part of his old, rational world. My own response to the wild unpredictability of the universe has been to write stories, to play the piano, to read, listen to music, look at paintings - not that the world may become explainable and reasonable but that I may rejoice in the freedom which unaccountability gives us. — Madeleine L'Engle

You will be educated, which means that you will be interested where others are bored, that you will notice unities where others experience randomness, and that you will intend meanings where others are just spouting words. For exactly that is supposed to be the result of becoming literate: The world becomes a thick texture of significance that you know how to access. — Eva Brann

Shouldn't atheist have an equal obligation to explain pleasure in a world of randomness. Where does pleasure come from? — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

I'm sorry for the randomness of what I wrote, Mr. Oswald. There's been a lot to absorb.'
Without looking up, he says, 'Never apologize for writing your truth, Mr. Fink. There are no right or wrong answers. — Wendy Mass

There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can't face the terror that it might all be random. — Lauren Beukes

The Drunkard's walk: how randomness rules our lives / Leonard Mlodinow. — Leonard Mlodinow

to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you'll give up on trying to master it. — Peter Thiel

You would renounce organizing your future. You would let yourself be guided by the randomness of encounters and events, indifferent to one choice over another. — Edouard Leve

The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Think about Isis," Jaz repeated. "And Sadie ... there
is a purpose. You taught us that. We choose to believe in Ma'at. We create order out of chaos, beauty and meaning out of ugly randomness. That's what Egypt is all about. That's why its name, its ren, has endured for millennia. Don't despair. Otherwise Chaos wins. — Rick Riordan

Nothing's random. Even if it looks that way, it's just because you don't know the causes. — Johnny Rich

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. — Catherine McCormack

This cognitive illusion was first noted in 1968 by the mathematician William Feller in his classic textbook on probability: "To the untrained eye, randomness appears as regularity or tendency to cluster."33 Here are a few examples of the cluster illusion. The — Steven Pinker

I had forgotten about the pleasures of college radio, the exquisite randomness of what got played, the twenty-minute between-songs banter of nineteen-year-olds, the smack of music I'd never heard against my brain cavity. — Piper Kerman

Once the cells in a biological machine stop working, it can never be started again. It goes into a cascade of decay, falling toward disorder and randomness. Except in the case of viruses. They can turn off and go dead. Then, if they come in contact with a living system, they switch on and multiply. (194) — Richard Preston

After years of pretending at emotions, he'd grown to appreciate their mystery, their chaos and randomness. Sometimes they were predictable, one-dimensional, almost stupid - other times they were so confounding, complex, and exquisite that he was convinced humans really were as special as they thought themselves to be. — Kim White

In love, fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure. — Alain Badiou

The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Moshe was an Israeli with an ear-slitting laugh. He used it in the same way as a madman uses a gun, spraying it around with bewildering randomness. — Alex Garland

The threads of circumstance that lead to tomorrow are so tenuous that all the fussing and worrying about decisions is futile compared to the pure randomness of existence. — Nick Bantock

Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events. — Daniel Kahneman

We create order out of chaos, beauty and meaning out of ugly randomness. — Rick Riordan

Yet again, isn't there something terrible in randomness - the idea that at the very bottom of its calculations, real depravity has no master plan of any kind, it's just a dreamy whim that slides out of people when they are trapped or bored or too lazy to analyze their own mania. — Aeschylus

Randomness is the true foundation of mathematics. — Gregory Chaitin

These capacities for randomness may have been amplified into human creativity through sexual and social selection. — Geoffrey Miller

In a free economy, a high degree of apparent randomness does not mean actual randomness. An apparently random pattern is evidence not of purposelessness but of an entrepreneurial economy full of creative surprises. — George Gilder

The lesson taught by the war was clear: to be human is to be small, powerless, and subject to the forces of randomness. — David J. Morris

It might not have been Mike,' she said, 'but somebody left something somewhere.'

I couldn't really argue with that. It was as succinct a summing up of the seeming randomness of events in life as I had ever heard. — Bob Tarte

In terms of how the music developed, it was my normal process, which I would say is really a hybrid process of sketching on bits of paper, playing the piano, playing synthesisers, using the computer, staring out of the window, finding things I'd forgotten about, happy accidents, failed plans, best intentions, equipment failures. It is a multidimensional process incorporating a lot of planning and intention and a lot of randomness. Ultimately I just follow the material where it wants to go a lot of the time. — Max Richter

Before my unfeeling eyes, the repressed bitterness of my whole life peels off the suit of natural joy it wears in the prolonged randomness of every day. I realize that I'm always sad, however happy or content I may often feel. And the part of me that realizes this stands a little behind me ... — Fernando Pessoa