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Miscellaneous quotes

973 quotes from 439 people

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While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
Nassim Nicholas Talebborn 1960The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 198
- Knowledge
- Luck
It is not enough to be in the right place at the right time. You should also have an open mind at the right time.
Paul Erdős1913–1996My Brain Is Open: The Mathematical Journeys of Paul Erdos (1998) by Bruce Schechter, p. 99
- Luck
- Thinking
One’s condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one.
Norman Mailer1923–2007Interview in Writers at Work Third Series (1967) edited by George Plimpton
Once you begin a great movement, there’s no telling where it will end. We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.
Ronald Reagan1911–2004Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Address (1989)
- Change
We do not escape our boundaries or our innermost being. We do not change. It is true we may be transformed, but we always walk within our boundaries, within the marked-off circle.
Ernst Jünger1895–1998The Glass Bees (1957)
- Change
- Character
There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in travelling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one’s position, and be bruised in a new place.
Washington Irving1783–1859Tales of a Traveler (1824), Preface, p. 7
- Change
- Comedy
It is the nature of human institutions to degenerate, to lose their vitality, and decay, and the first sign of decay is the loss of flexibility and oblivion of the essential spirit in which they were conceived.
Sri Aurobindo1872–1950India’s Rebirth, 22 September 1907
- Change
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
T. S. Eliot1888–1965The Hollow Men (1925), IIn context
I’d rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph.
KKKen Kesey1935–2001As quoted in Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Ch. 1: “Black Shiny FBI Shoes”
Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances.
Herodotus484–425 BCThe Histories, Book 7, Ch. 49.
- Luck
Luck’s just another word for destiny…either you make your own or you’re screwed.
John le Carré1931–2020The Mission Song (2006)
- Luck
The world is more malleable than you think and it’s waiting for you to hammer it into shape.
Bonoborn 1960PENN Address (2004)
- Change
- Inspiration
Nought may endure but Mutability.
Percy Bysshe Shelley1792–1822Mutability (1816), st. 4In context
- Change
People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence.
Isaac Asimov1920–1992“The Planet that Wasn’t” originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (May 1975)
- Luck
Oftentimes a reverse has but made room for more prosperous fortune.
Seneca the Younger5 BC–AD 65Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XCI: On the Lesson to be Drawn From the Burning of Lyons
- Failure
- Luck