Best 471 quotes in «patterns quotes» category

It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.

It’s the combination of improbability with an independently given pattern that discredits chance.

It's vital to establish some rituals-automatic but decisive patterns of behavior-at the beginning of the creative process, when you are most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up, or going the wrong way.

I've kind of codified certain things for myself, rhythmic patterns and mechanical ways of using the bow to create layers of rhythm. What I'm trying to do is to create a complete piece of music on one instrument.

Like Godard, Tati is also remarkably appreciative of the odd beauty that can be revealed in the shapes, patterns and colors created by the technology of planned obsolescence.

I was surprised by the level of sophistication of the Special Operation forces. Among them were anthropologists and PhD candidates. I felt because I understand the patterns of nineteenth-century jihad in West Africa that I was definitely going to be more advanced than they were in comprehending what the militant rallying cry was.

Jordan followed, buttoning his jeans and muttering about how there was nothing strange about having a pattern of dancing penguins on your underwear.

Juggling is sometimes called the art of controlling patterns, controlling patterns in time and space.

Laws of nature don't know they are "fixed." That's a human pattern seeking description that comes out of our need to survive. It isn't an objective description of anything.

Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice.

Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvelously intricate in thought and action, our problems are most complex and, too often, silently borne.

Learn from everyone. Follow no one. Watch for patterns. Work like hell.

Life forms illogical patterns. It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by, for who knows whether any of them will ever return?

Love has been the ontological pattern for me. And also the withholding pattern.

Looking at the pattern of our existence from birth to death, we can see the way in which we are fundamentally nurtured by other's affection.

Love has been the ontological pattern for me. And also the withholding pattern. I am still on hold with regards to love. And the longer one is on hold, in suspense, on a search, the harder, paradoxically, it is to continue with a search.

Merilyn Simonds maintains an effortless balance between the dictates of story and memory . . .these aren't just the stories of one life; here are the patterns found in all our lives, richly celebrated.

Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story - a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.

Many people and governments share the mistaken belief that science, with new, ingenious devices and techniques, can rescue us from the troubles we face without our having to mend our ways and change our patterns of activity. This is not so.

Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.

Molecules don't have patterns. You create a pattern by the perception of something. The continuity of awareness is your perceptual field. Existence only occurs through the act of perception.

Most youth still hold the same values of their parents…if we do not alter this pattern, if we don’t resocialize, our system will decay.

[M]orality is not a ritualistic obedience to a code of behavior imposed by an external authority. It is rather a healthy habit pattern that you have consciously and voluntarily chosen to impose upon yourself because you recognize its superiority to your present behavior.

Multinational corporations do control. They control the politicians. They control the media. They control the pattern of consumption, entertainment, thinking. They're destroying the planet and laying the foundation for violent outbursts and racial division.

My career is built around a pattern that just keeps repeating itself over and over again. There's nothing surprising about it at all. My changes are as easy to predict as the sun coming up and down.

My hope is that flexible working and varying shift patterns will give workers a taste for idling and that they will gradually demand greater reductions in the length of the working week.

My daughter will say she's hungry, and I'm like, 'Buddy, you're just bored. Do you understand? And you're already starting a pattern of satisfying an internal disconnect with an external stimulation, and that's a dead-end road, sweetie. Courtney Love lives on that road; you don't want to live on that road.

My days all follow much the same pattern. They are structured and typical.

My greatest personal mistake is ever to allow a word or moment that “doesn’t count,” i.e., that I do not refer to my own basic principles. Every word, every action, every moment counts. (This is the pattern on which everybody makes mistakes [or] becomes irrational — not relating their one action or one conviction to another.

Naturally, patterns emerge through repetition, and repetition yields up a type of discovery that reveals everything about itself, especially its sorry limits.

My life shows a clear pattern of total unpredictability.

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.

No change occurs if we just let our habitual tendencies and automatic patterns of thought perpetuate and even reinforce themselves, thought after thought, day after day, year after year. But those tendencies and patterns can be challenged.

No one ever taught me, and I never had formal classes in pattern making, so I was like, Okay, I'll just drape, and I'll sew as I pin it.

Now, there are sometimes making a connection between one section and another that sometimes you do want to see the pattern because it helps you to lead into the next thing - it's a rhetorical thing, where you just see how the pattern has to go into the next thing.

One alters the past to form the future but there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change.

Once you start backing into all of that, then you see this incredibly intricate, totally wrong-headed way to do things, but nevertheless has a lot of merit to it for the fact that [Buckminster Fuller] is recognizing much larger patterns, seeking much larger patterns and seeking much larger ways of trying to solve for the problem of unhygienic conditions in slums. They really were unhygienic. Whether his family was living in the slum is debatable but they were unhygienic. That needed to be addressed. He was attempting to address it.

Once you see what you are doing or have been doing, you also see its futility, and that unconscious pattern then comes to an end by itself. Awareness is the greatest agent for change.

One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

One of the basic steps in saving a threatened species is to learn more about it: its diet, its mating and reproductive processes, its range patterns, its social behavior.

One of the best things about humans is we recognize patterns, so we get things like science, music, philosophy. One of the worst things is that we see patterns that are not there so we get things like racism, homophobia and Jerry Falwell.

One's character is one's habitual way of behaving. We all have patterns of behavior or habits, and often we are quite unaware of them. When Socrates urged us to Know thyself, he clearly was directing us to come to know our habitual ways of responding to the world around us.

Only the human brain can deliberately change perceptions, change patterns, invent concepts and tolerate ambiguity.

Others follow patterns; we alone are unpredictable.

Order cannot possibly be brought about through conformity to a pattern, under any circumstances.

Our character is basically a composite of our habits. Because they are consistent, often unconcious patterns, they constantly, daily, express our character.

Parents are like shuttles on a loom. They join the threads of the past with threads of the future and leave their own bright patterns as they go.

Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.