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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“[…] Mike was designed to operate on incomplete data. Lately he had reprogrammed himself to put emphasis on words; his hesitations were dramatic. Maybe he spent pauses stirring random numbers to see how they matched his memories.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

“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

“A lot of things that happen in life are random.

Let’s explore this through an analogy: Grains of Sand in a bucket

If you pour sand into a bucket, statistically, there will be some grains on the top, most in the middle and some on the bottom. All grains can’t be at the top. So, does it mean the grains of sands at the top special/better than the ones at the bottom? or is it just blind randomness at play?

You might say the human mind is not a grain of sand, it has talent and the capacity to think.

Well, what determined your talents and thoughts? Did you choose them or were they too influenced by factors beyond your control?

I would argue that your talents and your thoughts themselves are not conjured up by you alone, but are also the result of luck and circumstances.”
― Anubhav Srivastava, UnLearn: A Practical Guide to Business and Life

“What brought us together? I sometimes wonder. Was it chance? Fate? Luck?
I often marvel at the randomness of it all, the tangled threads that wove us into something stronger than our individual selves.
That a time so dark could provide such light is a miracle, I think.”
― Katherine Applegate, The One and Only Family

“Some things happen because events align in such a way to make them happen ... Sometimes there was a clear guilty party, but ... Sometimes, some things just happen. That's all. What you can control now is how you react to that awful, dreadful, tragic thing that happened.”
― Alam Nigar, Under the tamarind tree

“I’ve fallen in love or imagine I have; went to a party and lost my head. Bought a horse which I don’t need at all.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“In spite of all the paraphernalia for keeping things together, how haphazard life is, and the judgments of time.”
― Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke

“im so random”
― chris tu

“It is difficult to assume that nature itself created that which was beyond itself and then integrated such abilities into itself.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“افتراض أن التعقيد الهائل الموجود في الكائنات قد نشأ من طفرات عشوائية هو مجرد فرضية تحتاج لإثبات مادي لأنها فرضية تحمل ادعاءً علميا”
― طارق أحمد السيد, معادلة الإيمان

“My mom just sighs and says, "It was a different time," and he was a young man, but nobody's convinced, not even her.

What else is there to say, though?

It happened. Welcome to earth.”
― Daniel Nayeri, Everything Sad Is Untrue

“It used to be that I would look for the deeper meaning in everything, thinking that I was some kind of hermeneutic sleuth moving through the world, but I stopped that when I was twelve. Though I would have been unable to articulate it then, I have since come to recognize that I was abandoning any search for elucidation of what might be called subjective or thematic meaning schemes and replacing it with a mere delineation of specific case descriptions, from which I, at least, could make inferences, however unconscious, that would allow me to understand the world as it affected me. In other words, I learned to take the world as it came. In other words still, I just didn’t care.”
― Percival Everett, Erasure

“Le possible est plus riche que le réel. La nature nous présente en effet l’image de la création, de l’imprévisible nouveauté. Notre univers a suivi un chemin de bifurcations successives : il aurait pu en suivre d’autres. Peut-être pouvons-nous en dire autant pour la vie de chacun d’entre nous.”
― Ilya Prigogine, La Fin des certitudes : Temps, chaos et les lois de la nature