Randomness Quotes

“Randomness rarely works for businesses.”
― Pooja Agnihotri, 17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail:Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure

“IRL: It's funny how when I'm loud people tell me to be quiet, but when I'm quiet people ask me" What's wrong.”
― Skylar Blue

“Seek and you shall fun!”
― Helen Edwards, Nothing Sexier Than Freedom

“The music could no more repeat itself than could snowflakes, and could no more fail of beauty.”
― Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity

“Life is governed by chance, not wisdom.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“The sun god Ra was described as the ba which “came forth from Nun,” the ba “which Nun created.” In these terms, the ba is a potentiality which is actualized. According to these statements, Chaos produced Order. Nun, primordial Chaos, generated the god Ra who then made the ordered cosmos. This is actually extremely similar to science’s version of Big Bang theory. Randomness – primordial Chaos, formlessness or non-existence (non-being) – miraculously produced its opposite: a formed, ordered cosmos. In truth, science hasn’t moved on at all from Egyptian mythology. It has no better explanation for how the cosmos was produced than ancient Egyptian priests spinning mythological webs did.”
― Steve Madison, Think Like an Egyptian: How the Ancient Mind Worked

“Boys climb hills “because they are there.” Men climb mountains because they know there is something beyond them and they want to see it. They want to see what is “behind,” “farther in,” and “deeper down.” Men are not afraid of what they will find. They know something is there because no matter where man has looked, there has always been more. Armchair explorers call that more “randomness.” Real explorers call it God.”
― Jean-Michel Hansen

“Somehow, we believe that we have a better chance of winning a game of probabilities, totally disregarding that everybody who is playing the game has the same possibility of winning.”
― Naved Abdali

“As I studied the mass more closely, I began to feel that it was not the product of random accumulation but that it actually had a coherent form all of its own; and while the individual items were dirty and deteriorating, taken together they were like a strange piece of art.”
― Yōko Ogawa, tiểu xuyên dương tử (From: "Revenge" )rom

“I hesitate to give advice because every major single piece of advice I was given turned out to be wrong and I am glad I didn’t follow them. I was told to focus and I never did. I was told to never procrastinate and I waited 20 years for The Black Swan and it sold 3 million copies. I was told to avoid putting fictional characters in my books and I did put in Nero Tulip and Fat Tony because I got bored otherwise. I was told to not insult the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal; the more I insulted them the nicer they were to me and the more they solicited Op-Eds. I was told to avoid lifting weights for a back pain and became a weightlifter: never had a back problem since.

If I had to relive my life I would be even more stubborn and uncompromising than I have been.
One should never do anything without skin in the game. If you give advice, you need to be exposed to losses from it.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Life is governed by chance, not wisdom.”
― Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

“Our definition of an atheist as someone who denies perfection has an immediate corollary; he is also someone who denies meaning. If you think about it, meaning is entirely invested in perfection. We expect a perfect being to know the meaning of existence, and be capable of telling us. We expect a perfect evolutionary process to culminate with we ourselves being perfect and knowing everything. Our pursuit of perfection/God is the meaning of life. To be an atheist is to reject perfection, hence reject meaning. That’s why we brand all atheists as nihilists. They don’t believe in anything. They don’t believe in meaning. And that makes them no different from machines. They are not living beings, or they refuse to be living beings. They are unquestionably high on the autistic spectrum, and they see themselves and the universe as machines rather than living, evolving organisms, getting more and more perfect.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“Darwinism is the most primitive version of evolution
you can get, and doesn’t make any formal sense since it mixes indeterminism (random mutation) and determinism (natural selection). A truly randomist system could never give rise to natural selection in the first place. Nothing would ever be selected according to any teleological criteria. Things would be selected at random, leading to no progress and no evolution at all! If you believe in random genetic mutation, why don’t you also believe in random natural selection? How on earth does a process come into existence out of nothing that looks exactly like teleological breeding?”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“There is nothing more mystical, miraculous and magical than scientific randomness, where existence jumps out of non-existence for no reason.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“If the principle of sufficient reason means that everything that happens has a reason why it is thus and not otherwise, the opposite is things happening for no reason at all – randomness! This is the entire basis of the scientific “explanation” of existence. Science is a formally irrationalist system opposed to the principle of sufficient reason. That’s why it’s astounding when people such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris claim to be on the side of reason. They plainly don’t know the meaning of the word.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“Nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only in his failure.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“In physics—or wherever natural processes seem unpredictable—apparent randomness may be noise or may arise from deeply complex dynamics.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“There is no rhyme or reason for any of it. Life is just a casino—numbers, probabilities, and cigarette smoke—that is all we are. Life is like this. You walk into a casino. You walk over to the bar and the bartender gives you two shots of cheap whiskey. You walk in hungry, tired. Maybe you’re already a bit drunk. The whiskey goes straight to your head and you light a cigarette—you know, to calm the nerves. You walk over to a craps table. But with all of the smoke, with your eyes blurry from the alcohol, you can hardly tell what it is. Nonetheless, the dice are rolled. Nobody asks you any questions. They roll the dice and whatever the number is, that’s how long you have to play. That’s life. Just a numbers game.”
― Moses Yuriyvich Mikheyev, Bodies: A Romantic Bloodbath

“Action is much more than random motion of the body and the mind. True action is born of wonder. When our heart, mind and our entire human capacity is invested in what we do, we get to see true action. The deeper the root of our action goes within our being the more spontaneous our action becomes. True action is indeed not random motion – like goods moving unconsciously through an assembly line. Action is the movement of the conscious being towards a larger purpose.”
― Debashis Chatterjee, The Other 99%: You Can Dare To Lead

“How do I pack my rucksack? More like a gambler than a minimalist. I am not someone who likes solving puzzles. Because I never leave anything I might want behind, I first pack anything that falls into my hands. Then as if looking for a prize, I put in a hand, rummage about and pull objects out at random until the rucksack reaches the correct weight. With this process I always have sufficient spare clothing.”
― Reinhold Messner, The Second Death of George Mallory: The Enigma and Spirit of Mount Everest

“..all tragedies are [unforeseeable]. That’s what makes them so hard to bear. The acceptance that life is random and often cruel. We seek to attribute blame. We cannot accept that things happen without reason. That not everything is within our control. We make ourselves small gods of our own universe without any of God’s mercy, wisdom or grace.”
― C.J. Tudor, The Hiding Place

“..all tragedies are [unforeseeable]. That’s what makes them so hard to bear. The acceptance that life is random and often cruel. We seek to attribute blame. We cannot accept that things happen without reason. That not everything is within our control. We make ourselves small gods of our own universe without any of God’s mercy, wisdom or grace.

[the Rev. Jack Brooks]”
― C.J. Tudor, The Burning Girls

“Why do we find it so hard to accept that life is pure chance?”
― Alberto Barrera Tyszka, The Sickness

“Over the long run, outcomes are governed by probabilities.”
― Naved Abdali

“As I studied the mass more closely, I began to feel that it was not the product of random accumulation but that it actually had a coherent form all of its own; and while the individual items were dirty and deteriorating, taken together they were like a strange piece of art.”
― Yōko Ogawa, tiểu xuyên dương tử (From: "Revenge" )

“We are not randomly suboptimal in our decisions. We are systematically suboptimal.”
― Leland Wilkinson, The Grammar of Graphics. Statistics and Computing.

“Tears dry up in the randomness of death.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“A library undermines whatever order it might possess, with random pairings and casual fraternities.”
― Alberto Manguel, Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions

“Oh how the scientific multitudes rejoiced when they discovered that they could dispense with the old God and replace it with their new God – randomness. To every problem, the scientists gleefully clapped their hands and yelled, with all the enthusiasm of the multitudes crowding into the Vatican on Easter Sunday, “Randomness did it.” And they believed it with all the fervor of the Catholic Crusaders who chanted as their battle cry Deus vult ( “God wills it” ). Scientists are as convinced by randomness – the absence of explanation – as the Crusaders were by their Christian God, a totally empty explanation.”
― David Sinclair, Universals Versus Particulars: The Ultimate Intellectual War

“No random event has ever been empirically demonstrated. Events have been observed which have been interpreted as being based on randomness, but this is merely an inference, and rationalists can advance totally different inferences that never once refer to randomness.”
― David Sinclair, Universals Versus Particulars: The Ultimate Intellectual War