Randomness Quotes

“From where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.”
― Tony Hillerman, Coyote Waits

“If you hear a" prominent "economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Yes, life always takes the side of life, and somehow the victims are blamed. But it wasn’t the best people who survived, nor did the best ones die. It was random!”
― Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus

“Ka knew very well that life was a meaningless string of random incidents”
― Orhan Pamuk, Snow

“Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“Luck is not as random as you think.

Before that lottery ticket won the jackpot, someone had to buy it.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“Most of the time - 99 percent of the time - you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.

And very, very rarely - by some miracle of chance and coincidence, butterflies beating their wings just so and all the threads hanging together for a minute - you get the chance to do the right thing.”
― Lauren Oliver

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

“... Nature almost surely operates by combining chance with necessity, randomness with determinism...”
― Eric Chaisson, Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos

“The two go hand in hand like a dance: chance flirts with necessity, randomness with determinism. To be sure, it is from this interchange that novelty and creativity arise in Nature, thereby yielding unique forms and novel structures.”
― Eric Chaisson, Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos

“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, Dune

“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.”
― Stanisław Lem, Highcastle: A Remembrance

“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, A Circle of Quiet

“I wore a groove in the kitchen floor with endless trips to the fridge, hoping against hope that I had somehow missed a plateful of cold sausages on the previous 4,000 excursions. Then, for no obvious reason, I decided to buy a footstool.”
― Jeremy Clarkson, The World According to Clarkson

“Vimes took the view that life was so full of things happening erratically in all directions that the chances of any of them making some kind of relevant sense were remote in the extreme. Colon, being by nature more optimistic and by intellect a good deal slower, was still at the Clues are Important stage.”
― Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

“He said that the principal function of music was to organize the details into harmonies that were intended to make us forget that there was randomness all around us. The same, he said, could be said for great books.”
― Seldon Edwards

“Always lists to be made, as if writing items in neat vertical rows might stave off randomness and chaos.”
― Dani Shapiro, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

“A billion dollar idea often begins with a random thought.”
― John Joclebs Bassey, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“Wavefunction collapse is anything other than “random”. If you could really see what was going on, you would see that nothing ever happens randomly, any more than a dice throw produces a genuinely randomly outcome (if you could see what was going on, all the forces in play, you would know exactly what the outcome would be). Sensory ignorance is not ontological uncertainty. Reality knows exactly what it is doing even if you don’t!”
― David Sinclair, Universals Versus Particulars: The Ultimate Intellectual War

“It’s actually funny that science lays claim to randomness since no one has ever seen a random event. Scientists interpret events as random rather than causal because of their dogmatic ideology. Their paradigm forbids them from referring to unobservable causal processes – implying a reality more fundamental than science which science cannot penetrate – but accepts randomness, as the least threat to science’s supremacy, even though, in Hume’s terms, randomness is no more empirical than causation, hence no more scientifically valid, and infinitely less rational!”
― David Sinclair, Universals Versus Particulars: The Ultimate Intellectual War

“Nietzsche didn’t kill God. Nietzsche became God. He simply substituted his Superman for God. It’s impossible to shake off God. Scientists don’t manage it. They replace God with randomness or matter. That’s what they worship. What atheists and scientists hate above all are meaning, purpose and any point, so they create a meaningless, purposeless and pointless God.”
― David Sinclair, The Church of the Serpent: The Philosophy of the Snake and Attaining Transcendent Knowledge

“Remind yourself that you can take neither the full credit nor blame for the outcomes in your life. There is always a factor of randomness involved. However, you should try your best, be proactive, and strive toward having a sense of control in life.”
― F. R. Amoeno, 55 Life Lessons from Amoeno’s Island

“Cruel randomness
[...]
Besides, if God really was selecting people to protect on the basis of some bigger picture, then you would not expect the number of people who are killed in various ways to be subject to the rules of probability. However, I can predict with remarkable accuracy the road toll each year, the number of people who will be struck by lightning, the number of people who will be killed by shark attacks, and so on. Each of these causes of death has a certain rate of occurrence that is quite predictable.

It is not just the number of deaths that is predictable, it is the whole probability distribution of deaths that is predictable. If you know the average number of deaths by car accidents in a city, then it is possible to calculate all the percentiles for that city. For example, you can estimate the numbers of deaths that would be exceeded only once every ten years. When you do this for many cities, you find that the 1-in-10-year extremes are exceeded in approximately 10% of cities each year. This is exactly what you would expect if the world was random, but not what you would expect if anyone was in control.

Car accidents, diseases, and industrial accidents all follow the same probability distribution, known as the “Poisson distribution”. The Poisson probability distribution is based on the assumption that accidents happen randomly. It is simply not possible for tragedies to appear to follow the Poisson probability distribution while actually being controlled by God. Any interventions of God that interfere in the random processes would be detectable. If they are not detectable, then they are random and God is not involved.

If we accept that the world is random, and that bad things happen to everyone by chance, where does that leave God? Either he does not exist, or he has no power, or he does not care. Whichever of those answers you prefer, God does not deserve our thanks.”
― Rob J. Hyndman, Unbelievable

“If you don't know the author, be careful about going" by the book.”
― Carlos Wallace

“Yet we humans abhor randomness and usually prefer predictability, even a false sense of it.”
― Ryan Gelpke, 2017: Our Summer of Reunions: Braai Seasons with Howl Gang (Howl Gang Legend)

“Faith is never blind, uncalculated, or random, but it is directional, counting the cost, fully aware of the risk involved, and yet determined to achieve the desired goal.”
― Dr. Lucas D. Shallua

“BURN GAZEBO BURN!” Icarus shouted as the ancient wooden structure burned away, exposing a hole in the ground.”
― Davis Swinney, Tales of Daavas: Heroes Dawn

“The beauty of randomness lies in its unpredictable dance. A symphony of chance that creates unique moments, unveiling the unexpected in a world that often craves order. In the chaos of randomness, there's a captivating allure. A reminder that life's most extraordinary moments are often born from the 'unplanned'.
Spontaneous.”
― Monika Ajay Kaul

“You never know when something as random as a spare waterbed mattress is going to turn your whole world around.”
― Richard Bresler, Worth Defending: How Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Saved My Life

“The world is composed of seemingly random events that constitute a harmonious whole.

Hans Christian Andersen said it best: ‘Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.”
― Felisa Tan, In Search for Meaning