Pattern Quotes

“We certainly are an odd bunch."
"Yes. Seven people. Odd.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

“No matter how trivial the recollections seem, note them down, and try searching for a pattern in them.”
― Dr Prem Jagyasi

“The next time you see a baby, remember that there is a powerful statistical computer in front of you”
― Albert Costa, The Bilingual Brain: And What It Tells Us about the Science of Language

“Every unique thing in nature is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world.

In geometric harmony of the cosmos there are ways that resemble, there are universal patterns, from blood vessels, to winter trees or to a river delta, from nautilus shell to spiral galaxy, from neurons in the brain to the cosmic web.

A whole universe of connections is in your mind – a universe within a universe – and one capable of reaching out to the other that gave rise to it. Billions of neurons touching billions of stars – surely spiritual.”
― Alejandro Mos Riera

“Oh!” Pattern said suddenly, bursting up from the bowl to hover in the air. “You were talking about mating! I’m to make sure you don’t accidentally mate, as mating is forbidden by human society until you have first performed appropriate rituals! Yes, yes. Mmmm. Dictates of custom require following certain patterns before you copulate. I’ve been studying this!”
― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer

“Oh God, that conversation last night or this morning or whenever that devil-ridden scrap of nightmare had been. How could two rational beings go on and on simply saying the same awful things to each other week after week, month after month?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Everything in the world could be found in the points of contact between them: all the ins and outs of the tides, the pulsations of stars in the sky, and the running of wolves across the cold north—all part of the same rhythm.
This one.
Theirs.”
― Traci Chee, The Speaker

“He unrequitedly loved Anna; Anna unrequitedly loved Marco; Marco probably unrequitedly loved some rando none of them had ever met. The world was pitiless. Nobody had any power over anyone else.”
― Kristen Roupenian, You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories

“We must consider what we mean when we say that the spiking activity of a neuron 'encodes' information. We normally think of a code as something that conveys information from a sender to a recipient, and this requires that the recipient 'understands' the code. But the spiking activity of every neuron seems to encode information in a slightly different way, a way that depends on that neuron's intrinsic properties. So what sense can a recipient make of the combined input from many neurons that all use different codes? It seems that what matters must be the 'population code' - not the code that is used by single cells, but the average or aggregate signal from a population of neurons.
In a now classic paper, Shadlen and Newsome considered how information is communicated among neurons of the cortex - neurons that typically receive between 3,000 and 10,000 synaptic inputs.They argued that, although some neural structures in the brain may convey information in the timing of successive spikes, when many inputs converge on a neuron the information present in the precise timing of spikes is irretrievably lost, and only the information present in the average input rate can be used. They concluded that 'the search for information in temporal patterns, synchrony and specially labeled spikes is unlikely to succeed' and that 'the fundamental signaling units of cortext may be pools on the order of 100 neurons in size.' The phasic firing of vasopressin cells is an extreme demonstration of the implausibility of spike patterning as a way of encoding usable information, but the key message - that the only behaviorally relevant information is that which is collectively encoded by the aggregate activity of a population - may be generally true.”
― Gareth Leng, The Heart of the Brain: The Hypothalamus and Its Hormones

“Action is one, two is a coincidence, three of them forms a trend and suggests a pattern.”
― Thomas Vato

“But whereas the story appeals to our curiosity and the plot to our intelligence, the pattern appeals to our aesthetic sense, it causes us to see the book as a whole.”
― E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

“Your opponent can observe and exploit any systematic pattern almost as easily as he can exploit an unchanging repetition of a single strategy. It is unpredictability that is important when mixing.”
― Avinash K. Dixit, The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life

“Fue como si me asomara a mis entrañas, como si entendiera que Dios crea infinitas copias usando un mismo molde, como si fabricara a las personas cortándolas a todas por el mismo patrón.”
― Leila Abu Zeyd, El año del elefante y otros relatos

“Even when something looks incoherent to an outsider, even when it's intended as incoherent for an insider, we as humans are still practically incapable of doing things without patterns.”
― Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

“Gods – all gods, I think – are just spells that keep going. Like waterwheels powered by the passage of souls, maybe. Prayer strengthens them, and so does residuum, the portion of the soul that remains in the corpse after death. The gods are not omniscient or omnipotent, just very different from us. More powerful in some ways, but locked into patterns of behaviour they cannot change, so they’re not really sentient, I suppose. Saints are p-p-points of congruency between our world and theirs.”
― Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, The Gutter Prayer

“You don't have to break down every detail. You just need to see the overall pattern to catch the weakness in it.”
― Marie Lu, Warcross

“Our common actions in reality are simply the sackcloth covering which hides the cloth-of-gold—the meaning of the pattern.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Justine

“Ce n’est pas parce que la sociologie cherche les déterminismes — et trouve des régularités — que tout est déterminé.”
― Pablo Jensen, Pourquoi la société ne se laisse pas mettre en équations

“Everyone has weaknesses. They are generally revealed in the patterns of mistakes they make. Knowing what your weaknesses are and staring hard at them is the first step on the path to success.”
― Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work

“Consider how you can use visual pattern to define a space for its purpose and activity...

- In the bathroom, you might want to use rippled or soft undulating patterns to remind yourself of the calmness of water, think water surface, sand, or shell patterns.
- In the living room, leafy patterns and forest-inspired shapes and patterns can be relaxing and restorative.
- Retreats or quiet spaces such as bedrooms or home offices might benefit from images of sheltered or secluded natural spaces, for example cave-like patterns.
- By contrast, lively spaces may suit patterns of more dynamic natural systems, such as waterfalls and rivers.

Remember that there is a balance to strive for here. Subtlety is key, so the patterns don't dominate the space and overwhelm you. Also keep in mind that there are no straight lines in nature, so hard edges can appear harsh.”
― Oliver Heath, Design A Healthy Home: 100 ways to transform your space for physical and mental wellbeing

“Elsewhere Lankford reiterates that this belief system was by no means confined to the Plains, the Eastern Woodlands, and the Mississippi Valley. It is better understood, he argues, as part of 'a widespread religious pattern' found right across North America and 'more powerful than the tendency towards cultural diversity.' Indeed, what the evidence suggests is the former existence of 'an ancient North American international religion ... a common ethnoastronomy ... and a common mythology. Such a multicultural reality hints provocatively at more common knowledge which lay behind the façade of cultural diversity united by international trade networks. One likely possibility of a conceptual realm in which that common knowledge became focused is mortuary belief [and] ... the symbolism surrounding death.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“Pattern Consistency is a major key to time-management. Search for and discover the best time to do planning, and do your planning at that same time every day. When the priorities receive their own place in the day, each day will have the same pattern. Pattern begets comfort and productivity. Patience An abundance of patience is needed to manage time consistently. Making the change to becoming a good time-manager may be very difficult.”
― Swen Nater, You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned: John Wooden's Teaching Principles And Practices

“Just as learning to produce phonologically contoured speech and learning to hear it as such are interrelated aspects of a single task, so, too, learning to creatively project words into new contexts and to grasp the projections of those same words by others into new contexts are two aspects of a single task. What can be hard to see here is that these two pairs of interrelated capacities - to hear and produce potentially significant phonemes, on the one hand, and to detect and to project a pattern of use, on the other - are themselves no less intertwined.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“God” is mathematics, and mathematics is simply the principle of sufficient reason. Absolutely everything happens for a specific reason. There is nothing at all that is random and indeterministic. If any such things were possible, the universe would instantly unravel into absolute chaos where order, organisation and pattern were all impossible.”
― Mike Hockney, The Mathematical Universe

“As a subject of behavioral study, nest architecture offers an appealing feature that practically no other behavior offer; namely, the nest is a perfect record of the collective digging effort of a colony, and once cast, is ready to study. By studying a series of casts of increasing size it is possible to describe the nest's growth and ontogeny, infer its species-typical characteristics, and bracket the range of variation. By doing this under different environments and soil types, possibly with transplanted colonies, it is possible to tease out the variation that the environment imposes on the architecture. The current study is only a small, initial step toward creating a field of nest architecture studies, whose ultimate goal is an understanding of how the nest emerges from self-organizing behavior, what function it serves, how it varies within and between species, and how it evolves. In addition, these casts reveal something previously unseen. The study of nest architecture is thus a true exploration of a hidden world that hold unsuspected beauty, patter, and complexity.”
― Walter Tschinkel

“Basically, control is just an illusion. Far too many factors contribute to everything that happens during a day, even during an hour, a week, a month, a year. And that's the end of the matter. You think you control something because you think you recognize a certain pattern, so you imagine that you’re always gonna achieve the same results with the same actions. Until something unexpected happens.”
― Lucian Vicovan, Another dance in the flames

“Deduce.”
― Monaristw

“When those who truly pushed the box have no say in which direction the box goes, our home is left with one of the most common problems in the known world.

With even the boxes, scratching their heads.”
― Monaristw

“Matters of heart follow a different pattern altogether rather, they follow neither any pattern, nor logic.”
― Neelam Saxena Chandra, the red diary

“I am not that air, I am the pattern that it assumed, temporarily.”
― Ted Chiang, Exhalation