Quotes about randomization (341 quotes)

“Edison was by far the most successful and, probably, the last exponent of the purely empirical method of investigation. Everything he achieved was the result of persistent trials and experiments often performed at random but always attesting extraordinary vigor and resource. Starting from a few known elements, he would make their combinations and permutations, tabulate them and run through the whole list, completing test after test with incredible rapidity until he obtained a clue. His mind was dominated by one idea, to leave no stone unturned, to exhaust every possibility.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

Idea , Success

“For every album I’ve ever made, I’ve written many times more music than has actually been released, and the way I choose which music appears is almost totally random, but one thing I have never done is to make music for the sake of commercialism”

Vangelis (1943) Greek composer of electronic, progressive, ambient, jazz, pop rock, and orchestral music

1984
Context: On albums and commercialism: "For every album I’ve ever made, I’ve written many times more music than has actually been released, and the way I choose which music appears is almost totally random, but one thing I have never done is to make music for the sake of commercialism... I don’t think it’s possible to guarantee commercial success for an album anyway, because nobody really knows what is commercial and what isn’t. Even if I went out of my way to make an album that was more accessible to the public, that would not guarantee its commercial success".

Music , Way , Appearance , Time

“Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.”

Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 2 “Good Design” (p. 41)

Nature

“Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create… Neo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change [which] led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

Nature , Change

“It’s something very few actors really get to experience. When you’re a character actor or voiceover guy, it’s job to job. You’re like a migrant worker, almost. The longevity [of “SpongeBob”] is an unbelievable statistical anomaly. It’s like, I didn’t buy that many lottery tickets and I won the lottery. It’s a totally random, harmonic convergence of people you met and your agent getting you an audition. Actors have so little control over their own lives; it’s nice to have something you’re not in control of that’s actually positive. There was a point when “SpongeBob” was cancelled after the first few seasons and the first movie. We went to a wrap party that I thought was the season wrap party but was the series wrap party. Nobody knew. So I already feel like I dodged a bullet.”

Tom Kenny (1962) American actor

Interview: Tom Kenny talks voicing SpongeBob Squarepants and 'Mr. Show' http://www.metro.us/entertainment/interview-tom-kenny-talks-voicing-spongebob-squarepants-and-mr-show/zsJoba---UspN3mmMXb2BE (February 2, 2015)

People , Guy , Feeling , Season

“Gambling is a kind of tax: a tax on stupidity. A tax on greed. Some money changes hands at random, but the net cash flow always goes one way - to the Government, to the casino operators, to the bookies, to the crime syndicates. If you ever do win, you won't have won against them. They'll still be getting their share. You'll have won against all the penniless losers, that's all.”

Greg Egan book Eugene

Eugene
Fiction, Axiomatic (1995)

Money , Stupidity , Way , Change

“Charisms are not distributed at random but are dispensed by God to supply what is needful and lacking in his Church at each historical moment. If they are from God, they usually do not flow with the latest fashionable trend but much more likely contain an antidote and remedy for the perils of the time.”

Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905–1988) Swedish Catholic theologian

First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr (1968)

God , Fashion , Time

“When one door opens, another closes.
this is the eternity's circle,
mistakes belongs to us, but not all,
the fate mapped out for us to follow,
but does not define our choices,
beings of necessity and randomness,
we're rattling over the abyss
in the vicinity of dying stars”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: An ocean of souls

“Your friend's poetry is terrible," he said.
Clary blinked, caught momentarily off guard. "What?"
"I said his poetry was terrible. It sounds like he ate a dictionary and started vomiting up words at random.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

“Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult "What is that?"”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then? p. 17e

Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Ludwig Wittgenstein / Quotes / Culture and Value (1980)
1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993)
Source: Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951

Children

“Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement… Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear. Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

Source: Acquiring Genomes: A Theory Of The Origin Of Species

Death , Literature , Appearance , Change

“Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City.”

Douglas Adams book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Source: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

“It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness--however temporary, however flimsy--of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another.”

Alice Munro book Too Much Happiness

Source: Too Much Happiness

World , Personality , Happiness

“Ka knew very well that life was a meaningless string of random incidents”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

Life

“In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd…
It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.”

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) Austrian writer

Source: Chess Story

Game

“Self-control is something for which I do not strive. Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

31
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)

“My only request is that you will not quote me at random, or selectively, or out of context. I have noticed again and again that the average scholar from the West is very scrupulous when it comes to presenting other people's point of view. But I cannot say the same about Western scholars with a conscious Christian bias. Very recently I had a shocking experience from the Southeast Asia correspondent of the Time magazine. I found him absolutely dishonest.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Jesus Christ, Artifice for Aggression, 1994

People , Quotes , Time

“I take her hand, as I did before. I speak to her, rather timidly and at random: "Carnal love isn't the whole of love."”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

"It's love!" Marie answers.
Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face

Love

“As random and as subjective as this award is, it means a great deal in a year of extraordinary, yet again, extraordinary performances by women … And perhaps those of us in the industry who are still foolishly clinging to the idea that female films with women at the center are niche experiences. They are not. Audiences want to see them, and in fact, they earn money. The world is round, people.”

Cate Blanchett (1969) Australian actress

After winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Blue Jasmine, (2 March 2014)

Women , Money , People , World

“Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.”

Stefan Zweig book The Post Office Girl

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

Distant

“That which is static and repetitive is boring. That which is dynamic and random is confusing. In between lies art.”

John Locke (1632–1704) English philosopher and physician

This statement has been attributed to John A. Locke, but John Locke did not have a middle name. The words "dynamic," "boring" and "repetitive," found in this quote, were not yet in use in Locke's time. (See The Online Etymology Dictionary http://www.etymonline.com/abbr.php.) John A. Locke is listed on one site as having lived from 1899 to 1961; no more information about him was available.
Misattributed

Art

“The definition of random in terms of a physical operation is notoriously without effect on the mathematical operations of statistical theory because so far as these mathematical operations are concerned random is purely and simply an undefined term. The formal and abstract mathematical theory has an independent and sometimes lonely existence of its own. But when an undefined mathematical term such as random is given a definite operational meaning in physical terms, it takes on empirical and practical significance. Every mathematical theorem involving this mathematically undefined concept can then be given the following predictive form: If you do so and so, then such and such will happen.”

Walter A. Shewhart (1891–1967) American statistician

[Shewhart, Walter A., Deming, William E., Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control, The Graduate School, The Department of Agriculture, 1939, 18]
Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product,1931

Mathematics

“You & James Ferdinand simply can't learn to distinguish betwixt intellectual opinion & irrelevant instinctive emotion... For instance, he has the idea that I place an exaggerated intellectual valuation on the 18th century merely because my chance emotions have given me a strong but irrational subjective sense of belonging to it. I've told that bird dozens of times that I have no especial intellectual brief for Georgian days... He can't understand my ability to class as merely one period among others an age to which random early impressions have so closely bound my emotions & sense of identity... the point is that my own personal mess of subjective emotions has nothing whatever to do with my intellectual opinions. I have freely declared myself at all times (like everybody else in his respective way) a mere product of my background, & do not consider the values of that background as applicable to outsiders. The only way for the individual to achieve any contentment or harmonic relationship to a pattern is to adhere to the background naturally his; & that is what I am doing. Others I urge to adhere to their own respective backgrounds & traditions, however remote from mine these may be. When I venture now & then to suggest values of a more general kind, I approach the problem in an entirely different way—speaking not as Old Theobald of His Majesty's Rhode-Island Colony, but as the cosmic & impersonal Ec'h-Pi-El, denizen of the invisible world 'Ui-ulh in the second zone of curved space outside angled space... If there is any approach to an absolute value in the cosmos—or at least on this planet—then this is it. Sincerity—is-or-isn't-ness—technical perfection—harmony—coherence—consistency—symmetry—all these things are obviously aspects of one single property of space, energy, & general mathematical harmonics whose universality gives it the deepest possible significance. I have thought this all my life, & that is why to me one Newton or Einstein, one M. Atilius Regulus, M. Porcius Cato, or P. Cornelius Scipio, seems to me in certain ways worth a full dozen of your prattling little Keatses & Baudelaires.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 312
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

Life , Age , World , Way

“Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?" — It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said "this is a man," "this is a house," etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 17e

Children , Time , Housing

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, that we've enjoyed some good times this evening, and enjoyed some laughter together, I feel it is my obligation to remind you of some of the negative, depressing, dangerous, life-threatening things that life is really all about; things you have not been thinking about tonight, but which will be waiting for you as soon as you leave the theater or as soon as you turn off your television sets. Anal rape, quicksand, body lice, evil spirits, gridlock, acid rain, continental drift, labor violence, flash floods, rabies, torture, bad luck, calcium deficiency, falling rocks, cattle stampedes, bank failure, evil neighbors, killer bees, organ rejection, lynching, toxic waste, unstable dynamite, religious fanatics, prickly heat, price fixing, moral decay, hotel fires, loss of face, stink bombs, bubonic plague, neo-Nazis, friction, cereal weevils, failure of will, chain reaction, soil erosion, mail fraud, dry rot, voodoo curse, broken glass, snake bite, parasites, white slavery, public ridicule, faithless friends, random violence, breach of contract, family scandals, charlatans, transverse myelitis, structural defects, race riots, sunspots, rogue elephants, wax buildup, killer frost, jealous coworkers, root canals, metal fatigue, corporal punishment, sneak attacks, peer pressure, vigilantes, birth defects, false advertising, ungrateful children, financial ruin, mildew, loss of privileges, bad drugs, ill-fitting shoes, widespread chaos, Lou Gehrig's disease, stray bullets, runaway trains, chemical spills, locusts, airline food, shipwrecks, prowlers, bathtub accidents, faulty merchandise, terrorism, discrimination, wrongful cremation, carbon deposits, beef tapeworm, taxation without representation, escaped maniacs, sunburn, abandonment, threatening letters, entropy, nine-mile fever, poor workmanship, absentee landlords, solitary confinement, depletion of the ozone layer, unworthiness, intestinal bleeding, defrocked priests, loss of equilibrium, disgruntled employees, global warming, card sharks, poisoned meat, nuclear accidents, broken promises, contamination of the water supply, obscene phone calls, nuclear winter, wayward girls, mutual assured destruction, rampaging moose, the greenhouse effect, cluster headaches, social isolation, Dutch elm disease, the contraction of the universe, paper cuts, eternal damnation, the wrath of God, and PARANOIAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Playing With Your Head (1986)

Life , God , Bad luck , Children

“The point at which life becomes 'worthless,' and the point at which the means necessary to preserve it become 'extraordinary' or 'inappropriate,' are neither set forth in the Constitution nor known to the nine Justices of this Court any better than they are known to nine people picked at random from the Kansas City telephone directory…[therefore] even when it is demonstrated by clear and convincing evidence that a patient no longer wishes certain measures to be taken to preserve her life, it is up to the citizens of Missouri to decide, through their elected representatives, whether that wish will be honored.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

On the court's lack of authority regarding the right to die: Cruzan v. Missouri Department of Health, 497 U.S. 261 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&navby=case&vol=497&invol=261&friend=oyez (1990) (concurring).
1990s

Life , People , Justice

“Life is not governed by chance; it is not random. Your very existence has been willed by God, blessed and given a purpose! Life is not just a succession of events or experiences. It is a search for the true, the good and the beautiful. It is to this end that we make our choices; it is for this that we exercise our freedom; it is in this - in truth, in goodness, and in beauty - that we find happiness and joy.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2008, Papal Welcome (17 July 2008)

Life , God , Truth , Beauty

“Does the painter imitate the body correctly if he guides his brush without any method, and if his hand is moved at random and the lines are not drawn with art? In the same way you will not put the sentiment of your mind in front of the others’ eyes unless you use appropriate and distinct words, a fitting arrangement of words and the right order of sentences. For, just as we represent bodies by colours, we represent the sentiment of our mind by speech.”

Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) German reformer

Source: Praise of Eloquence (1523), p. 63

Art , Way

“Either one or the other [ analysis or synthesis ] may be direct or indirect. The direct procedure is when the point of departure is known-direct synthesis in the elements of geometry. By combining at random simple truths with each other, more complicated ones are deduced from them. This is the method of discovery, the special method of inventions, contrary to popular opinion.”

André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) French physicist and mathematician

André-Marie Ampè, in André-Marie Ampère: Enlightenment and Electrodynamics http://books.google.co.in/books?id=QWZKQWB-sbQC&pg=PA159, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 159

Truth , Departure

“It's been at least 20 years. I used to eat burgers and steak, and I would just be knocked out afterward; I had to give it up. The first thing was dairy. I was about 24 years old and I had tons of acne and mucus. I met some random girl on a bus who told me to quit dairy and all those symptoms would go away three days later. By God she was right.”

Woody Harrelson (1961) American actor

Interview with Maxim magazine, explaining why he became vegan; as quoted in "Woody Harrelson’s Vegan Acne Cure", in HuffingtonPost.com (23 September 2009) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/23/woody-harrelsons-vegan-ac_n_295765.html.

God , Girl

“The formation in geological time of the human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field is as unlikely as the separation of the atmosphere into its components. The complexity of the living things has to be present within the material [from which they are derived] or in the laws”

Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) logician, mathematician, and philosopher of mathematics

governing their formation
As quoted in "On 'computabilism’ and physicalism: Some Problems" by Hao Wang, in Nature’s Imagination (1995), edited by J. Cornwall, p.161-189

Law , Nature , Time

“Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random”

Donald Ervin Knuth book The Art of Computer Programming

Vol. II, Seminumerical Algorithms
The Art of Computer Programming (1968–2011)

“What place can be left for random action, when God constraineth all things to order?”
Quis enim cohercente in ordinem cuncta deo locus esse ullus temeritati reliquus potest?

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480) philosopher of the early 6th century

Prose I; translation by H. R. James
The Consolation of Philosophy · De Consolatione Philosophiae, Book V

God

“A philosopher has remarked that if a man knew that he had thirty years of life before him, it would not be an unwise thing to spend twenty of those years in mapping out a plan of living, and putting himself under rule; for he would do more with the ten well-arranged years than with the whole thirty if he spent them at random. There is much truth in that saying. A man will do little by firing off his gun if he has not learned to take aim.”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

A Good Start: A Book for Young Men and Women, (1898)

Truth , Life , Learning

“For this companion volume to A New Earth, I selected passages from the original book that felt particularly suitable for inspirational or meditative reading. For this reason I do not recommend that you read this book straight through from cover to cover. It would be far more beneficial to read, at the most, one chapter at a time, stopping at and perhaps rereading whatever passages elicit an inner response. Then let the words sink in and sense the truth to which they point, which is, of course, already within you. It can also be helpful to open the book at random occasionally, read one page or just one passage and let the words point the way to that dimension deep within that is beyond words, beyond thought. The truth to which the words point, the timeless dimension of consciousness, cannot be arrived at through discursive thought and conceptual understanding.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

<Small> From The Introduction https://eckharttolle.com/oneness-with-all-life-excerpt/</small>
Oneness With All Life: Inspirational Selections from A New Earth (2008)

Time , Reading , Understanding , Help

“Most of us, even if only for two minutes in our lives, have experienced at some time or another an inexplicable and random sense of complete bliss, unrelated to anything that was happening in the outside world.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

World , Sense , Time

“Out of the cacophony of random suffering and chaos that can mark human life, the life artist sees or creates a symphony of meaning and order. A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

Life , Suffering , Dependency

“We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates.”

Robert Coover (1932) writer, teacher

“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

Love

“In a dream I cannot see
tangled abstract phallacy
random turmoil builds in me
i'm a addicted to chaos
-Megadeth, Addicted to Chaos”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

Dreams

“Do me a favor."

"Don't lick your seat belt?"

Ash's expression was total confusion. "Huh? where did that randomness come from?”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

“He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph. Things should look right. Fun; there should be a lot of fun and no more sadness than absolutely necessary.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Life , Sadness , Way

“Jace wasn’t exactly prone to random fits of panic”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

“Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

Imagination

“I've never asked, but I'm sure he has a fairly stringent policy about random teenagers lurking in his shrubbery.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Simon to Clary, pg. 114
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)

“In a world like this one, only the random makes sense.”

Libba Bray Going Bovine

Source: Going Bovine

World , Sense

“Are you fangalicious? -Jess, a random blogger

I could never be as fangalicious as you'd want me to be.-Fang”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Fang

“Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.”

Wally Lamb (1950) american novelist

Religion

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

Tony Hillerman book Coyote Waits

Source: Coyote Waits

“Her fluency was marvelous. She would say things at random, intricate, flamelike, or slide off into a parenthetical limbo peppered with fireworks-- admirable linguistic feats which a practiced writer might struggle for hours to achieve.”

Henry Miller book Sexus

Source: Sexus

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

James Gleick book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Source: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“Random Girl after a hookup: "Do you love me"
Tucker: "I don't understand the question.”

Tucker Max I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

The Tucker Max Stories
Source: I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
Context: Tucker: Are you married?
Girl: Yes.
Tucker: How good is the marriage?
Girl: Very good.
Tucker: So there is no chance of us hooking up?
Girl: No.
Tucker: Well, do you have any hot friends who aren't fucking prudes? Hey--where are you going? I was only kidding! I respect the sanctity of the monogamous relationship! WHORE!
Context: Tucker: Do you hate the World Bank?
Girl: Uhh, umm, well, I mean, yeah, I feel that...
Tucker: You don't hate the World Bank.
Girl: I don't?
Tucker: No. You're mad at your father. You just want daddy to hug you more.
Girl: What?
Tucker: You were a sociology major weren't you?
Girl: NO!
Tucker: What was your major?
Girl: [Pauses] Uhhh, English Literature.
Tucker: [Pause--to give her a look of contempt] Did your parents send you a bill for college? How are those Marxist Literary Critique classes working out for you? You work at Barnes and Noble don't you?
Girl: NO--I wor--
Tucker: Shouldn't you be blocking an intersection right now? How many anti-sweatshop petitions have you signed--EVEN THOUGH YOU HAVE REEBOKS ON. Very-anti globalization to wear those with your animal tested Clinque make-up made in Nepal. Well, at least you're consistent in your shameless hypocrisy.
Girl: What a fascist piece of shi--
Tucker: You ever wake up in the middle of the night because a couple of cats are clawing each other to death outside your window? That's what it's like listening to you speak.
Girl: [A mishmash of stammered half insults]
Tucker: Seriously--If I stuck my dick in your mouth would that shut you up?
Girl: Wha... YOU ARE SUCH AN ASSHOLE!
Tucker: HEY--Don't blame me for the wound in your crotch. [As I walk off] By the way, you owe us a rib.

Love , Girl , Understanding , Question

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

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

“There are no random acts… We are all connected… You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind…”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Variant: That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate on life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.
Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)
Context: "All the people you meet here have one thing to teach you." Eddie was skeptical. His fists stayed clenched. "What?" he said. "That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind."

Life

“A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything.”

Sei Shonagon book The Pillow Book

Source: The Pillow Book
Source: The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon (1002), p. 44

“Well chaps first I'd like to say a few vile things more or less at random, not only because it is expected of me but also because I enjoy it.”

Donald Barthelme book Snow White

Source: Snow White

“This city is dying of rabies. Is the best I can do to wipe random flecks of foam from its lips?”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

“We create order out of chaos, beauty and meaning out of ugly randomness.”

Rick Riordan book The Throne of Fire

Source: The Throne of Fire

Beauty

“Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.”

Cormac McCarthy (1933) American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter

Source: All The Pretty Horses: All The Pretty Horses

Question

“The falling flakes were random and without purpose; the snow was drunker than she was.”

Chuck Klosterman book Downtown Owl

Source: Downtown Owl

“Ragnor and Catarina both begged him to give the instrument up. Random strangers on the street begged him to give the instrument up. Even cats ran away from him.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: What Really Happened in Peru

Cats

“Lothaire betrayed us! Again.” -Random demon.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Dreams of a Dark Warrior

“these random unkind moment that catch you wen you least expect them.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

“I want to talk to you and be random with you and be ridiculous with you.”

David Levithan Boy Meets Boy

Source: Boy Meets Boy

“Because to me, there is no logic of any kind behind misogyny. Therefore, it’s funny, because it’s so completely random to me. It’s senseless.”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

“The threads of circumstance that lead to tomorrow are so tenuous that all the fussing and worrying about decisions is futile compared to the pure randomness of existence.”

Nick Bantock (1949) British artist

Decision

“My entire life has felt like chance. Random moments of loss and connection. This is the first one that feels, instead, like fate.”

Christina Baker Kline (1964) American writer

Source: Orphan Train

Life , Fate , Feeling , Loss

“Phillip is a repository of random snatches of film dialogue and song lyrics. To make room for all of it in his brain, he apparently cleared out all the areas where things like reason and common sense are stored.”

Jonathan Tropper (1970) American writer

Source: This is Where I Leave You

Sense

“Love is random; fear is inevitable.”

Orson Scott Card book Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

Source: Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996)

Love , Fear

“A. J. nods out of politeness, but he doesn’t believe in random acts. He is a reader, and what he believes in is narrative construction. If a gun appears in act one, that gun had better go off by act three.”

Gabrielle Zevin (1977) American writer

Source: The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Appearance

“Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe---in fact, random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Stranger in a Strange Land

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

Universe , Chance

“Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Invisible Monsters

Source: Invisible Monsters

Education , Feeling , Game

“He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.”

David Nicholls book One Day

Source: One Day

Life , Way

“I mean, who cares about SpongeBob SquarePants? I'm sitting here with Wolverine!
-random kid talking to Ari”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: School's Out—Forever

“Random quotes don't constitute an argument.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Quotes

“I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.”

Angela Carter book The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Source: The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“If we have to be cat burglars, I'm going to see what' to steal in the fridge."
We're trying to find evidence she's the poisoner. Just a thought before you start putting random things in your mouth." Ruth shrugged and walked past Val.”

Holly Black (1971) American children's fiction writer

Source: Valiant

Cats , Past

“These houses had been plunked down with an alarming randomness -- unevenly spaced, on crooked lines, like whoever had designed the place had said, "We'll just follow this cat, and wherever he sits down, we'll build something.”

Maureen Johnson book Let It Snow

Source: Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances

Cats , Housing

“Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: Outliers: The Story of Success

Success

“If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined.”

Mark Helprin book Winter's Tale

Source: Winter's Tale

“What do you call a planet where bad guys stroll through life with success draped around their shoulders like a King’s cloak, while random horrors are visited upon the innocent heads of children? I call it Earth.”

Jordan Sonnenblick (1969) American writer

Source: Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie

Life , Children , Guy , Success

“We choose to believe in Ma'at. We create order out of chaos, beauty out of ugly randomness. That's what Egypt is all about.”

Rick Riordan book The Throne of Fire

Source: The Throne of Fire

Beauty

“Miracles occur,
If you dare to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's
begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Angels , Waiting

“Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make.”

Douglas Coupland Microserfs

Source: Microserfs

Decision , Personality

“What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?”

John Updike book Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories

Source: Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories

Past

“Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark.”

Bryce Courtenay (1933–2012) Australian novelist

Change , Chance

“The self-delusion that mysterious forces and persons unknown are conspiring against us is, surprisingly, a comforting belief, because it means we’re significant enough in this anarchic world to warrant someone’s enmity. That delusion saves us from the far more difficult to accept reality: that we’re not that important to anyone. That the universe just isn’t “into” us.
Paranoia is the emotive-psychestructure’s response to feeling ignored, unloved, or forgotten in an existence filled with random acts of destructive indifference emphasizing the inherent futility of life and struggle. If you’re ever to achieve serenity, ultimately you must accept that in such a vast cosmos, you simply don’t matter very much.”

Malcolm Azania book From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain

Source: From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain (2007), Chapter 6 “Up is Down: The Path Inside is Outside” (p. 185)

Life , World , Feeling , Reality

“Throughout his last half-dozen books, for example, Arthur Koestler has been conducting a campaign against his own misunderstanding of Darwinism. He hopes to find some ordering force, constraining evolution to certain directions and overriding the influence of natural selection. […] Darwinism is not the theory of capricious change that Koestler imagines. Random variation may be the raw material of change, but natural selection builds good design by rejecting most variants while accepting and accumulating the few that improve adaptation to local environments.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"Double Trouble", pp. 38–40
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

Books , Hope , Imagination , Nature

“.. the point of a randomizing device like a coin flip, [is] to make the result uncontrollable by making it sensitive to so many variables that no feasible, finite list of conditions can be singled out as the cause.”

Daniel Dennett book Freedom Evolves

Freedom Evolves (2003)

“I recognize nothing that is not material. In physics, chemistry and biology I see only mechanics. The Universe is nothing but an infinite and complex mechanism. Its complexity is so great that it borders on willfulness, suddenness, and randomness; it gives the illusion of free will possessed by conscious beings.”

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935) Russian and Soviet rocket scientist and pioneer of the astronautic theory

The Cosmic Philosophy, 1931

Universe

“But I didn't believe in the theory that human beings – thinking, loving beings – originated from fish that sprouted legs and crawled out of the sea. Or that human beings began as single-celled organisms that developed into monkeys who eventually swung down from trees; I believed we came about through a random process, but were created by God.”

Sarah Palin book Going Rogue: An American Life

Going Rogue: An American Life (2009), p. 217 http://books.google.com/books?id=Wx00mzMRGH8C&pg=PA217&dq=%22But+I+didn't+believe+in+the+theory%22, quoted in Memoir Is Palin’s Payback to McCain Campaign, The New York Times, 2009-11-14 https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/15book.html?_r=2&pagewanted=2&ref=books,
2014

Love , God , Thinking , Fish

“A pencil is a simple and predictable piece of technology. There's only one way of it working (it will function when it is sharp), and an obvious failure model(too short, too blunt, no lead). With a car, especially the kind of limp-along rust bucket most of us got for our first ride, it's more complex. There's coaxing involved, especially on cold mornings. There's that noise that never amounts to anything but never goes away, random stalls you begin to put down to the cast of the moon. None of it means it's broken, just that it requires friendly attention, that it has needs. Gradually you acquire a ritualized relationship to it, a bond forged by its unpredictability, by the fact it has to be dealt with. Which is how you come to know people, after all: not by things they have in common with everyone else, but through learning your way around their eccentricities, their hard edges and unpredictable softnesses, the things that make them different from everybody else.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Source: The Lonely Dead (2004), Ch. 11

People , Cars , Way , Failure

“I don’t need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost’s observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person’s random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the “alienated artist” cut off from everybody who isn’t, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so — a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.)”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Other Frost”, p. 29
Poetry and the Age (1953)

People , Feeling , Nature , Sense

“As long as man has not ascended to the rank of existence where he leaves behind him the domain of the universal and enters into his own personal domain—no longer dependent upon the principles operative in the realm of the universal—he is still subject to the rule of the species and the universal form. However, as soon as he liberates himself from the burden of the species, he becomes a free man. Complete freedom belongs only to the prophet, the man of God. The man who is a mere random example of the species, on the other hand, is wholly under the rule of the scientific lawfulness of existence. Between this species man and the man of God, between necessity and freedom, is the middle range in which most people find themselves.”

Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–1993) American theologian

Source: Halakhic Man (1983), p. 135