“What have you been reading, The Gospel according to St. Bastard?!”
“People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.”
Lucky and Unlucky
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Samuel Butler 232
novelist 1835–1902Related quotes
“Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.”
Source: The Emperor's New Mind (1989), Ch. 6, Quantum Magic and Quantum Mastery, p. 269.
Context: It seems to me that we must make a distinction between what is "objective" and what is "measurable" in discussing the question of physical reality, according to quantum mechanics. The state-vector of a system is, indeed, not measurable, in the sense that one cannot ascertain, by experiments performed on the system, precisely (up to proportionality) what the state is; but the state-vector does seem to be (again up to proportionality) a completely objective property of the system, being completely characterized by the results it must give to experiments that one might perform.
Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected "Problems" of "Logic" (Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte "Probleme" der "Logik" (1984), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer, Indiana University Press, 1994, ISBN 0253004381, p. 7)