Quotes about patterns

Maurice Strong -

A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmental damaging consumption patterns.

Rick Riordan - The Last Olympian

Patterns repeat themselves in history

Chuck Palahniuk - Survivor

There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.There is no free will. There are no variables.

G.H. Hardy - A Mathematician's Apology

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than their, it is because they are made with ideas.

Lois Farfel Stark - The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times

We form a mental map, and then that shape, shapes us

G.H. Hardy - A Mathematician's Apology

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of poems. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Amit Ray - Mindfulness Meditation for Corporate Leadership and Management

Great leader knows that under the turmoil of chaos and change, there is a beauty of patterns and designs.

Lisa Kleypas - Love in the Afternoon

No marriage stays in the same pattern forever. It is both the best feature of marriage and the worst, that it inevitably changes.

Stephen Dunn -

ConnubialBecause with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I've mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.

Doug Dillon -

Pay attention to the intricate patterns of your existence that you take for granted.

Marvela Dawnay -

Never write a book and let it sit on a shelf

Orson Scott Card - Shadow of the Hegemon

America's intellectual community has never been very bright. Or honest. They're all sheep, following whatever the intellectual fashion of the decade happens to be. Demanding that everyone follow their dicta in lockstep. Everyone has to be open-minded and tolerant of the things they believe, but God forbid they should ever concede, even for a moment, that someone who disagrees with them might have some fingerhold of truth.

Bruce Lee - Tao of Jeet Kune Do

Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage. Truth is outside of all patterns.

David Vann - Aquarium

As if each of us might somehow have a blueprint. As if somewhere there's the shape of my life, and I had the chance to choose a few variations, but not far from the pattern.

Katherine McIntyre - Rising for Autumn

We deal with so many nightmares on a regular basis. When I’m watching a horror movie, there’s a pattern, a sense of control in them. I’m just an observer, not having to deal with any of the repercussions. It’s a nice dream to think monsters play by the rules, that they’ve got a pattern you can unlock and follow. Real life’s messy, and the chaos leaves you devastated in the wake.

Sunday Adelaja -

Human being living at the level of biomass will comply with all standards and patterns that are required by the surroundings and society

Eudora Welty - On Writing

What discoveries I made in the course of writing stories all begin with the particular, never the general. They are mostly hindsight: arrows that I now find I myself have left behind me, which have shown me some right, or wrong, way I have come. What one story may have pointed out to me is of no avail in the writing of another. But 'avail' is not what I want; freedom ahead is what each story promises - beginning anew. And all the while, as further hindsight has told me, certain patterns in my wo

Norbert Wiener - The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

We are not the stuff that abides, but patternsthat perpetuate themselves.

Ralph Linton -

[The] tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns...We are now...only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for developments in our culture outside technology, particularly in the social, political and economic fields. It is safe to predict that...such social inventions as modern-type Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism will be regarded as primitive experiment

A.J. Darkholme - Rise of the Morningstar

Sometimes you can grow more in a shorter amount of time with the right company than years of soul-searching alone, or by living the same patterns you've lived for your entire life.

Rollo May - The Courage to Create

Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.

Roger Scruton - The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope

Civilization is always threatened from below, by patterns of belief and emotion that may once have been useful to our ancestors, but that are useful no longer.

David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

The truth of a myth, your Honor, is not its words but its patterns.

Paul Lockhart - A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form

So [in mathematics] we get to play and imagine whatever we want and make patterns and ask questions about them. But how do we answer these questions? It’s not at all like science. There’s no experiment I can do ... The only way to get at the truth about our imaginations is to use our imaginations, and that is hard work.

Mitsu Suzuki - A White Tea Bowl: 100 Haiku from 100 Years of Life

New Year’s cards from friends — colored patterns of my life

Terry Tempest Williams - When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.

Julian Barnes -

Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern.

Arthur Gordon - A Touch of Wonder

Rhythm. Life is full of it; words should have it, too. But you have to train your ear. Listen to the waves on a quiet night; you’ll pick up the cadence. Look at the patterns the wind makes in dry sand and you’ll see how syllables in a sentence should fall. Arthur Gordon

Ronald Graham -

Math is sometimes called the science of patterns.

Robert Greene - Mastery

If we experience any failures or setbacks, we do not forget them because they offend our self-esteem. Instead we reflect on them deeply, trying to figure out what went wrong and discern whether there are any patterns to our mistakes.

Eudora Welty - On Writing

I'm prepared now to use the wonderful word confluence, which of itself exists as a reality and a symbol in one. It is the only kind of symbol that for me as a writer had any weight, testifying to the pattern, one of the chief patterns, of human experience. Of course the greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memory - the individual human memory. My own is the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer. Here time, also, is subject to confluence

Vladimir Nabokov - Lectures on Literature

I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a signboard had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles—no matter the imminent peril

Ken Liu - The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potential in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper.At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high-precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random

Steven Magee - Light Forensics

I have noticed that the solar radiation reflections from rippled privacy windows cause greatly accelerated growth patterns in plants

Vironika Tugaleva -

When someone is cruel, harsh, mean, to not take their words personally is one thing, but to hear the silent cry within those words is another. This sort of perspective can not only liberate us from crippling self-doubt in the face of criticism, it can also liberate us from automatically becoming blind participants in the interaction patterns that the cruel person has become accustomed to—a favour we do for the other person as much as for ourselves.

Elizabeth Moon - The Speed of Dark

I like it that order exists somewhere even if it shatters near me.

Dean Koontz - Deeply Odd

...an age-old patter that seemed like chaos but was not...

Chuck Palahniuk -

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher.

Tony Hillerman - Coyote Waits

From where we stand the rain seems random. If we could stand somewhere else, we would see the order in it.

Emily St. John Mandel - Station Eleven

He placed a pinch of snow on his tongue and thought of making snow ice cream with Frank and their mother when they were small boys - 'First you stir in the vanilla' - Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will

Theodore Sturgeon - Weird Shadows From Beyond: An Anthology Of Strange Stories

I went back every evening, after work, for nearly a year. I learned the meaning of the cud of a leaf and the glisten of wet pebbles, and the special significance of curves and angles. A great deal of the writing was unwritten. Plot three dots on a graph and join them; you now have a curve with certain characteristics. Extend that curve while maintaining the characteristics, and it has meaning, up where no dots were plotted.In just this way I learned to extend the curve of a grass-blade and of a

Molly Friedenfeld - The Book of Simple Human Truths

If we want to grow, the way to break a pattern of negativity is to face anything negative with love.

Johnson Rizzo National Geographic Feb. 2013 -

A climate's changes are tough to quantify. Butterflies can help. Entomologists prefer "junk species--" the kind of butterflies too common for most collections-- to keep up with what's going on in the insect's world. They're easy to find and observe. When do something unusual, something's changed in the area.Art Shapiro's team at UC Davis monitors ten local study sites, some since the 1970s. The ubiquitous species are the study's go-tos, helping distinguish between lasting changes (climate warmin

Richard K. Morgan - Altered Carbon

There's a sameness to streetlife. On every world I've ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behavior seeping out from whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above.

Kemi Sogunle -

Until you are willing to learn the lessons, pay attention to details, and become patient with yourself, you will keep repeating the same patterns over and over again.

John Verndon -

The patterns we perceive are determined by the stories we want to believe.

Emma Richler - Be My Wolff

I need to tell you a story.'What

Mary Balogh - Simply Love

I do believe in fate, Anne-not the blind fate that gives one no freedom of choice, but a fate that sets down a pattern for each of our lives and gives us choices, numerous choices, by which to find that pattern and be happy.

Peter Ackroyd - Hawksmoor

It's difficult to know where to begin, sir.''Yes, the beginning is the tricky part. But perhaps there is no beginning, perhaps we can't look that far back.' He got up from his desk and went over to the window, from where he could see thin pillar of smoke rising into the clouds. 'I never know where anything comes from, Walter.''Comes from, sir?''Where you come from, where I come from, where all this comes from.' And he gestured at the offices and homes beneath him. He was about to say something e

Roshan Sharma -

Life knows what you want, and gives you exactly the same thing, at the moment. You attract exactly what you want in the moment. You have to remain present in the moment. If you are already lost in yourself, you can never understand the ways of life.

Dean Koontz - Deeply Odd

If patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives — and they do — then the law of harmony insists that the most harmonious of all patterns, circles within circles, will most often assert itself.

William J. Bernstein -

It’s human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation.

Italo Calvino - The Complete Cosmicomics

If I love order, it's not the mark of a character subjected to an inner discipline, a repression of the instincts. In me the idea of an absolutely regular world, symmetrical and methodical, is associated with that first impulse and burgeoning of nature.The rest of your images that associate passion with disorder, love with intemperate overflow - river fire whirlpool volcano - are for me memories of nothingness and listlessness and boredom.

Catherynne M. Valente - The Bread We Eat in Dreams

Listen, everything is possible in here. You can burn every spinning wheel in the kingdom. You can cut your hair before he ever gets the chance to climb up. It is possible to decline the beanstalk. You can let the old witch dance at your wedding, hand out the kind of forgiveness that would wake the dead and sleeping. You can just walk away, get on a horse, and go wake some other maiden from her narrative coffin, if you’re brave, if you’re strong. What do you want? Do you want to escape? Or were y

Munia Khan -

I wonder at the starry pattern in the skyAre they little pieces of moon which want to fly..?

Kat Lahr - Anatomy Of Illumination

Sometimes we get stuck in patterns or reoccurring themes in our lives that require a shocking epiphany to give us the opportunity to see new possibilities and notice the obstacles that keep us from moving on.

Steven Pinker -

Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - This Side of Paradise

Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water,Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light,Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter…Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.Walking alone…was it splendor, or what, we were bound with?Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair?Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground withTapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air.

Jenny Downham - Before I Die

We make patterns, we share moments.

Jacqueline Carey - Kushiel's Chosen

I can see patterns in events, and behaviors; in mathematics, I follow slower

Patti Digh - and Live Intentionally

Perhaps we can recognize our way out of patterns rather than repeating our way out of them.

Samuel Arbesman - Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension

While we think of the boundary between what is legal and what is not as a clear dividing line, it is far from being so. Rather, the boundary becomes further and further indented and folded over time, yielding a jagged and complicated border, rather than a clear straight line. In the end, the law turns out to look like a fractal: no matter how much you zoom in on such a shape, there is always more unevenness, more detail to observe. Any general rule must end up dealing with exceptions, which in t

Michael Shermer -

Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.

Michael Shermer - Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design

Perceiving the world as well designed and thus the product of a designer, and even seeing divine providence in the daily affairs of life, may be the product of a brain adapted to finding patterns in nature. (38)

Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It's part of our DNA. That's why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.

Holly Sprink - Faith Postures: Cultivating Christian Mindfulness

It is easy to surround yourself with people who think in the same ways, believe the same ideas, and live life in similar patterns. Many communities are made up of the same kind of people to the extent that we intentionally have to seek people whose stories are completely different from ours.

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