#randomness

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

#randomness #freedom

Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about. ↗

— John Polkinghorne

#chance #come #contingency #happens #historical

I listen to Radio 4 and put the iPod on shuffle. I like the randomness of, say, the Stones, then something from Nina Simone, Nick Drake or Bob Dylan. ↗

— Catherine McCormack

#bob dylan #drake #dylan #i #ipod

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

#determinism #nature #necessity #randomness #age

[The sound of the wind] was just more proof that the workings of the world were random, that beauty, like suffering, was meaningless, that human life was as pointless as waves on sand. ↗

— Anita Diamant

#beauty #day-after-night #meaninglessness-of-life #random-chance #randomness

Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace. ↗

— James Gleick

#randomness #science #science

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

— Tony Hillerman

#order #patterns #rain #randomness #weather

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

#meaning #randomness #life