Butterfly Effect Quotes

For the want of a nail the shoe was lost, For the want of a shoe the horse was lost, For the want of a horse the rider was lost, For the want of a rider the battle was lost, For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost, And all for the want of a horseshoe-nail.

When it happens, you’re totally unprepared, fragmented and lost, looking for the hidden meaning in every little thing. I’ve replayed the events of that day a hundred thousand times, looking for clues. An alternate ending. The Butterfly effect. If I could find the butterfly that flapped its wings before we got into the car that day, I would crush it.

Small shifts in your thinking, and small changes in your energy, can lead to massive alterations of your end result.

The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth.

Each one of us is like that butterfly the Butterfly Effect . And each tiny move toward a more positive mindset can send ripples of positivity through our organizations our families and our communities.

You have been created in order that you might make a difference. You have within you the power to change the world.

Each smallest act of kindness, reverberates across great distances and spans of time --affecting lives unknown to the one who’s generous spirit, was the source of this good echo. Because kindness is passed on and grows each time it’s passed until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage, years later, and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each expression of hatred, each act of evil.

It used to be thought that the events that changed the world were things like big bombs, maniac politicians, huge earthquakes, or vast population movements, but it has now been realized that this is a very old-fashioned view held by people totally out of touch with modern thought. The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe.

I am a believer of butterfly effect. A small positive vibration can change the entire cosmos.

A butterfly flutters its wings in Malaysia and the changes in air currents cause a hurricane in Florida. I love that idea. That even one tiny action can create an enormous effect.

And above it all the butterfly effect. The sure knowledge that the entire life of a human being is like a single day in that human's life: unplannable, unpredictable, governed by the hidden tides of chaotic factors and buffered by butterfly wings...

Will had been taken aback in his confrontation with Arisaka to discover that his name- Chocho- meant "Butterfly"... He was puzzled to know why they had selected it. His friends, of course, delighted in helping him guess the reason. 'I assume it's because you're such a snazzy dresser,' Evanlyn said. 'You Rangers are a riot of color, after all.'... 'I think it might be more to do with the way he raced around the training ground, darting here and there to correct the way a man might be holding his shield, then dashing off to show someone how to put their body weight into their javelin cast,' said Horace, a little more sympathetically. Then he ruined the effect by adding thoughtlessly, 'I must say, your cloak did flutter around like a butterfly's wings.

Domino effects give way to butterfly effects given nonlinearity. “Outsized” conflates with “unpredictable” as a small cause yields disproportionate effects.

I knew the power of a single wish, after all. Invisible and inevitable, like a butterfly that beats its wings in one corner of the globe and with that single action changes the weather halfway across the world.

You've heard of the butterfly effect, right? That if a butterfly flaps its wings at just the right time in just the right place. It can cause a hurricane thousands of miles away. It's chaos theory, but see, chaos theory isn't exactly about chaos. It's about how a tiny change in a big system can affect everything.

The Butterfly Effect Close your eyes and think about that boy. Tell me how he makes you feel. Let your mind trace over his tired shoulders. Allow your thoughts to linger on that beautiful smile. Take a deep breath and try to push those dark feelings aside. For once let go of the reins you've wrapped so tightly around your heart. I know you are scared. Who could blame you? Love is a hurricane wrapped inside a chrysalis. And you are a girl walking into the storm.

Is there any sort of situation where you can say with certainty that a single person is responsible for what happens? Everything in life is dependent on so many different factors that interact in so many different ways.

6. You are the sum total of everything that has happened to you up until that last slurp of that cup of tea you just put down. How your parents hugged you, that thing your first boyfriend once said about your thighs – these are all bricks that have been laid from the soles of your feet up. Your eccentricities, foibles and fuck-ups are a butterfly effect of things you saw on telly, things teachers said to you and the way people have looked at you since the first moment you opened your eyes. Being a detective for your past – tracing back through all of it to get to the source with the help of a professional – can be incredibly useful and freeing.

I feel like a pink worm in the core of this green room, as though I have eaten my way in and should be working on becoming a butterfly, or something. I’m not real awake, here, at the moment. I hear somebody coughing. I hear my heart beating and the high-pitched sound which is my nervous system doing its thing. Oh, God, let today be a normal day. Let me be normally befuddled, normally nervous; get me to the church on time, in time. Let me not startle anyone, especially myself. Let me get through our wedding day as best I can, with no special effects. Deliver Clare from unpleasant scenes. Amen.

They say that if a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian rain forest, it can change the weather half a world away. Chaos theory. What it means is that everything that happens in this moment is an accumulation of everything that’s come before it. Every breath. Every thought. There is no innocent action. Some actions end up having the force of a tempest. Their impact cannot be missed. Others are the blink of an eye. Passing by unnoticed. Perhaps only God knows which is which. All I know today is that you can think that what you’ve done is only the flap of a butterfly wing, when it’s really a thunderclap. And both can result in a hurricane.

Have you ever heard of the butterfly effect? I learned about it in Science last year… Basically, the butterfly effect is a chaos theory, attributed to a guy named Edward Lorenz. Here’s the Clffnotes version: A butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, and it sets off a tornado in Texas. It means the smallest moments of the past, even the ones that don’t have anything to do with us, affect our future, and our future selves

Some things must remain the same in order for the universe to flow properly. One pebble dashed out across the ocean leaves a lifetime of ripples. They call it the butterfly effect.

Coincidence has nothing to do with faith or destiny , it's just a miss matched eqation of timing and spacing ... just like a butterfly effect

Coincidence has nothing to do with faith or destiny , it's just a miss matched equation of timing and spacing ... just like a butterfly effect

Though blessed with the enviable properties of a mink coat—graceful, unreasonable, and impractical no matter what she was draped over—she was nevertheless one of those people whose personality proved to be the bane of modern mathematicians. She was neither a flat nor solid shape. She showed no symmetry at all. Trigonometry, Calculus and Statistics all proved useless. Her Pie Chart was a muddle of arbitrary wedges, her Line Graph, the silhouette of the Alps. And just when one listed her under Chaos Theory—Butterfly Effects, Weather Predictions, Fractals, Bifurcation diagrams and whatnot—she showed up as an equilateral triangle, sometimes even a square.

Selethen was names Hawk. Alyss had been given the title of Tsuru, or Crane. . .Evanlynn was Kitsune, the Nihon-Jan word for Fox . . .Halt strangly enough had been known only as Halto-san. . . But Will had been taken aback in his confrotation with Arisaka to discover that his name - Chocho - meant "butterfly". It seemed a highly unwarlike name to him- not at all glamorous.And he was puzzled to know why they had selected it. His friends,of course, were delighted in helping him guess the reason. "I assume its because you're such a snazzy dresser," Evanlynn said. "You Rangers are like a riot of color after all." Will glared at her and was mortified to hear Alyss snigger at the princess's sally. He'd thought Alyss, at least, might stick up for him. "I think it might be more to do with the way he raced around the the training ground, darting here and there to correct the way a man might be holding his sheidl then dashing off to show someone how to put theri body weight into their javelin cast," said Horace, a little more sympathetically. Then he ruined the effect by adding thoughtlessly, "I must say, your cloak did flutter around like a butterfly's wings." "It was neither of those things," Halt said finally, and they all turned to look at him. "I asked Shigeru," he explained. "He said that they had all noticed how Will's mind and imagination darts from one idea to another at such high speed," . . Will looked mollified. "Isuppose it's not too bad it you put it that way. It's just it does seem a bit . . girly." .... " I like my name Horace said a little smugly. "Black Bear. It describes my prodigous strength and my mighty prowess in battle." Alyss might have let him get away with it if it hadn't been for his tactless remark about Will's cloak flapping like a butterfly's wings. "Not quite," she said. "I asked Mikeru where the name came from. He said it described your prdogious appetite and your mighty prowess at the dinner table. It seems that when you were escaping through the mountains, Shigeru and his followers were worried you'd eat the supplies all by yourself." There was a general round of laughter. After a few seconds, Horace joined in.

When we see something like this we forget the most important and most obvious thing…those butterflies will never fly again.” “It’s unnatural, and yet it’s so seductive…” “That’s exactly the effect that death has on some individuals. That’s why serial killers exist.

With these surface waters, through a series of delicately adjusted, interlocking relationship, the life of all parts of the sea is linked. What happens to a diatom in the upper, sunlit strata of the sea may well determine what happens to a cod lying on a ledge of some rocky canyon a hundred fathoms below, or to a bed of multicolored, gorgeously plumed seaworms carpeting an underlying shoal. or to a prawn creeping over the soft oozes of the sea floor in the balckness of mile-deep water.

A butterfly could flap its wings and set molecules of air in motion, which would move other molecules of air, in turn moving more molecules of air— eventually capable of starting a hurricane on the other side of the planet.

Like billiard balls colliding our courses were altered.

Kendrick stopped writing to make others feel comfortable; instead, he chose to elevate his thinking and make people catch up to him.

Butterfly effect.” “Right. It means small events can have large, whatchamadingit, ramifications. The idea is that if some guy kills a butterfly in China, maybe forty years later—or four hundred—there’s an earthquake in Peru. That sound as crazy to you as it does to me?” It did, but I remembered a hoary old time-travel paradox and pulled it out. “Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?” He stared at me, baffled. “Why the fuck would you do that?” That was a good question, so I just told him to go on.

In popular culture, the term “butterfly effect” is almost always misused. It has become synonymous with “leverage”—the idea of a small thing that has a big impact, with the implication that, like a lever, it can be manipulated to a desired end. This misses the point of Lorenz’s insight. The reality is that small things in a complex system may have no effect or a massive one, and it is virtually impossible to know which will turn out to be the case.

You have no effect on me with your gesture of Hippocrates refusing bric-a-brac from Artaxerxes. I dispense you from quieting me. Anyway, I'm sad. What would you have me tell you? Man is wicked, man is deformed; the butterfly has succeeded, man has missed. God failed on this animal. A crowd gives you nothing but a choice of ugliness. The first man you meet will be a wretch. 'Femme' rhymes with 'infâme', woman is infamous. Yes, I have the spleen, in addition to melancholy, with nostalgia, plus hypochondria, and I sneer, and I rage, and I yawn, and I'm tired, and I'm bored, and I'm tormented! Let God go to the Devil!

Be a flower. Be a seed. Let your growth arouse curiosity. Let it fascinate and amaze. Let it inspire the artist and the scientist. Let it shock the doubters. Let it grant hope to the hopeless. Let it begin in silence, and end with a loud bang. Don’t be an open book - be mysterious. Be extraordinary, be undefinable, be a ball of fiery fire, and above all, grow in silence, and let your success do the talking.

I'm sorry I started all this by trying to fly and I'd take it back if I could but I can't, so please think of it from my point of view: if you die I will have a dead brother and it will be me instead of you who suffers. Justin thought of his brother on that warm summer day, standing up on the windowsill holding both their futures, light and changeable as air, in his outstretched arms. Of course, Justin thought, I'm part of his fate just as he's part of mine. I hadn't considered it from his point of view. Or from the point of view of the universe, either. It's just a playing field crammed full of cause and effect, billions of dominoes, each knocking over billions more, setting off trillions of actions every second. A butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and my brother in Luton thinks he can fly. The child nodded. A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen.

We must treat ourselves with care, respect and compassion before we can effectively extend these things to others.

Their leader had no real knowledge of warfare or tactics. I was only a stubborn man and that was my greatest advantage in this fight.

You know, most people would compliment me on the fact that I won that shootout,' I point out. 'Is that what you need from people? To be told what a good girl you are?

One corner of his mouth tips up. 'Gisele,' he mocks. 'Prom king,' I mock back. With a soft chuckle, he spares me one last look before striding off.

Coincidence has nothing to do with faith , it's justa miss matched eqation of timing and spacing ... just like a butterfly effect

Butterfly Effect If butterfly’s flapping wings in Ohio, can cause a sandstorm in Texas, then batting your eyelashes next to me, can cause a hurricane near my solar plexus. (…)

It’s remarkable how the simplest of decisions can create a butterfly effect; how a seemingly inconsequential action can cause a tsunami.

Words can be like a butterfly effect.

His words triggered a butterfly effect and supplied me with some of my first notes, the first images for the composition of my blueprint, the ignition that sparked the cogs into motion.

it seemed entirely possible to him that religion and literature and art and music were all merely side effects of a brain structure that comes into the world ready to make language out of noise, sense out of chaos. Our capacity for imposing meaning, he thought, is programmed to unfold the way a butterfly’s wings unfold when it escapes the chrysalis, ready to fly. We are biologically driven to create meaning. And if that’s so, he asked himself, is the miracle diminished? It

Nothing? You wouldn’t change mistakes you’ve made or even, like, exams you could have done better on or something? Seriously, nothing?” “Have you heard of the butterfly effect?” “I am familiar with butterflies, yes. What effect do they have on my time machine?” “Not butterflies, the butterfly effect. If I change one thing in my past, it’d cause a ripple effect, and I wouldn’t chance not meeting you.

IN CHAOS THEORY, THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT IS THE SENSITIVE DEPENDENCY ON INITIAL CONDITIONS IN WHICH A SMALL CHANGE AT ONE PLACE IN A DETERMINISTIC NONLINEAR SYSTEM CAN RESULT IN LARGE DIFFERENCES IN A LATER STATE.

Everything has its own pace its own timing. True of working, studying, learning. True of illness, sorrow, grief. True of change, of transformation. True of conflict. True of peace. You can't change the pace without changing its nature, changing the experience. And the experience is its own end. The end never justifies the means because every means is its own end. It's not just about you, your natural pace, it's about what you're doing what's being done butterfly effects over miles and years. The river will not be pushed. The rain will not cease until it has finished pouring down. The sun will not rise before dawn. This is where we are.

If you want to have more, you have to become more. Success is not something you pursue. What you pursue will elude you; it can be like trying to chase butterflies. Success is something you attract by the person you become.

Across the world millions of lives are altered by the absence of the dead, but three members of Teddy's last crew—Clifford the bomb-aimer, Fraser, the injured pilot, and Charlie, the tail-end Charlie—all bail out successfully from F-Fox and see out the rest of the war in a POW camp. On their return they all marry and have children, fractals of the future.

What if I promise to keep my pants on?” The smile in his voice had butterflies fluttering in her stomach. She stared up at the ceiling. “Fine. But you’ll have to leave mine on, too.” “Well, shit.” His laughter warmed her all over. “You drive a hard bargain.” “I’m all about hard things.” She ran her tongue along her teeth. “You do have that effect on me.

No one's life has an instruction manual. That's the best damn thing about it. I choose and you choose and everyone makes choices that gave these butterfly effects on everything else- the results are either this exquisite ballet or an avant-garde multimedia melee

These choices are part of the butterfly effect of my life, whether I like it or not. If I make the wrong decision, it will affect the rest of my day. It sounds crazy, but I know from experience the complete and utter devastation caused by one misplaced judgement.

Speech therapy is an art that deserves to be more widely known. You cannot imagine the acrobatics your tongue mechanically performs in order to produce all the sounds of a language. Just now I am struggling with the letter l, a pitiful admission for an editor in chief who cannot even pronounce the name of his own magazine! On good days, between coughing fits, I muster enough energy and wind to be able to puff out one or two phonemes. On my birthday, Sandrine managed to get me to pronounce the whole alphabet more or less intelligibly. I could not have had a better present. It was as if those twenty-six letters and been wrenched from the void; my own hoarse voice seemed to emanate from a far-off country. The exhausting exercise left me feeling like a caveman discovering language for the first time. Sometimes the phone interrupts our work, and I take advantage of Sandrine's presence to be in touch with loved ones, to intercept and catch passing fragments of life, the way you catch a butterfly. My daughter, Celeste, tells me of her adventures with her pony. In five months she will be nine. My father tells me how hard it is to stay on his feet. He is fighting undaunted through his ninety-third year. These two are the outer links of the chain of love that surrounds and protects me. I often wonder about the effect of these one-way conversations on those at the other end of the line. I am overwhelmed by them. How dearly I would love to be able to respond with something other than silence to these tender calls. I know that some of them find it unbearable. Sweet Florence refuses to speak to me unless I first breathe noisily into the receiver that Sandrine holds glued to my ear. "Are you there, Jean-Do?" she asks anxiously over the air. And I have to admit that at times I do not know anymore.

But most of the time when I wear them, I don’t know, I’m kind of hoping—foolishly, probably—that people will read it, get the message, change their lives for the better, even if it’s only in the smallest of ways, and make the world a better place.” Knox was still grinning as he buttered his toast. “So you’re saying your shirts are like a butterfly effect?” “Pretty much, yeah. And when they hand me my Nobel Peace Prize in fifty years for changing the world, one snarky shirt at a time, I’m going to wave it in your face and chant ‘Told ya so’ about a million times.

Cars with flames painted on the hood might get more speeding tickets. Are the flames making the car go fast? No. Certain things just go together. And when they do, they are correlated. It is the darling of all human errors to assume, without proper testing, that one is the cause of the other.

The butterfly effect deals in the tendency of infinitesimal variations to amplify over time. ""You never play around with history, because the change you thought you were making for the better is likely to cause so many unforeseen ripples that it may well add up to a net loss. Too many variables to control the outcome.

We grow by making little great changes.

A butterfly flaps its wings far away, let's say, over Beijing. The flapping makes a small change to the wind, which makes another small change to the waves. All those little changes add up to big changes, and by the time those changes appear far, far away... Those tiny wings can lead to whipping winds, churning seas, and a mighty storm... Or a perfectly sunny day. You never know! Small changes, big unpredictable effects!

Those rose-tinted glasses look good on you, Sunshine.” Sunshine? I was sure he meant that mockingly, but the butterflies in my stomach stirred to life anyway, fanning away my anger. Traitors. “Thanks. You can borrow them. You need them more than I do,” I said pointedly. A low chuckle slipped from his throat, and I almost fell to the floor in shock. Tonight was turning out to be a night of firsts. Alex’s hand trailed up my spine until it rested on the back of my neck, leaving a cascade of tingles in their wake. “I feel it dripping all over me.” He did not—what? An inferno consumed my body. “You’re—you—no, I’m not!” I sputtered, pushing him away and scrambling off him. My core pulsed. Oh my God, what if I was? I couldn’t look, afraid I’d see a telltale wet spot on his jeans. I’d have to move to Antarctica. Build myself an ice cave and learn to speak penguin because I could never show my face in Hazelburg, D.C., or any city where I could run into Alex Volkov again. His chuckle blossomed into a full-blown laugh. The effect of his real smile was so devastating, even amid my mortification, that all I could do was stare at the way his face lit up and the sparkle that transformed his eyes from beautiful to downright breathtaking. Holy crap. Perhaps I should be grateful he never smiled, because if that was what he looked like while doing it…womankind didn’t stand a chance. “I’m talking about your bleeding heart,” he drawled. “What did you think I was talking about?” “I—you—” Forget Antarctica. I had to move to Mars. Alex’s laughter subsided, but the twinkle in his eyes remained.

He was a nuanced mosaic of varied influences, pulling into one body the lush humility of southern rap stalwarts like OutKast and Goodie Mob, the lyrical dexterity of Nas and Eminem, and the straight-ahead tough talk of Pusha T and Killer Mike.

Climate change may be far beyond the concerns of people in the midst of a life-and-death emergency, but it might eventually make the Mumbai slums uninhabitable, send enormous new waves of refugees across the Mediterranean, and lead to a worldwide crisis in healthcare.

It's a theory," Roald said. "Multiple universes, maybe. Parallel timelines. The idea that every possibility actually exists and that the life we're living is only one of them. There's also the famous butterfly effect. It's chaos theory, pretty heady stuff, but basically it says that a change in something as tiny as the flap of a butterfly's wings can eventually affect the path and strength of something as huge as a hurricane. In other words, if you could keep the butterfly from flying at a certain time and place, you might prevent a hurricane>

I’m a firm believer that everything happens for a reason. That there is a butterfly effect and everything that happens influences what will happen next. Even my mom dying. I mean, what if she hadn’t been on the road at that very minute in that very spot? Instead, what if it were a young family, or a pregnant woman in labor being rushed to the hospital? Maybe that drunk driver running into her saved other lives. And maybe one of those lives that was saved is someone who will go on to discover how to prevent cancer. Or global warming. Or nuclear war.

Tina Fey’s Bossypants. It’s the funniest book I’ve ever read. The first book that made me cry was The Diving Bell and The Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby simply for that fact it will always stick in my mind. Lastly, Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose by Mick Short, which is not designed to teach creative writing, but is one of the most useful books I’ve ever read. It picks apart literature to show how language is used in fiction to create certain effects. It changed the way I write, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes writing.

The butterfly effect deals in the tendency of infinitesimal variations to amplify over time. ""You never play around with history, because the change you thought you were making for the better is likely to cause so many unforeseen ripples that it may well add up to a net loss. Too many variables to control the outcome.”“The butterfly effect deals in the tendency of infinitesimal variations to amplify over time. "You never play around with history, because the change you thought you were making for the better is likely to cause so many unforeseen ripples that it may well add up to a net loss. Too many variables to control the outcome.

Our daily routines influence the lives of people and animals halfway across the world, and some personal gestures can unexpectedly set the entire world ablaze, as happened with the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, which ignited the Arab Spring, and with the women who shared their stories of sexual harassment and sparked the #MeToo movement.

The moth's enormous wings are velveted in a rich, warm, brown, and edged in bands of blue and pink delicate as a watercolour wash. A startling 'eyespot,' immense, and deep blue melding to an almost translucent yellow, luxuriates in the centre of each hind wing. The effect is one of a masculine splendour foreign to the butterflies, a fragility unfurled to strength

I was supposed to earn my doctorate, become a literature professor, settle down with a nice, normal husband and raise a nice, normal family. But someone somewhere absolutely obliterated the beetle that was supposed to keep the space-time continuum in check. Now I’m living in this strange butterfly-effect alternate universe where I write dirty books and hook up with movie stars.

This series tells the story of a Butterfly Effect. Back when Fabian was a teenager in Brussels in the 1990s, he had an idea. Because of that idea some people in Montreal eventually started to behave differently. As a consequence, other people down in the San Fernando Valley started behaving differently, and so on. For a year, I´ve been tracing Fabian’s Butterfly Effect. If I kept going, tracing consequence through to consequence, where might I end up? To give you an idea of the places where I do end up, by the end of episode 2, a man in Norway will be paying some women to set fire to his stamp collection. By the end of episode 4, a child in Oklahoma will be forced to move to the edge of town. By the end of episode 5, a man will lose his life. But first, let’s go back to the flap of the butterfly’s wings: Fabian, a teenager in Brussels.

The Misunderstood Social Butterfly   Like manipulative mothers, scheming co-workers act nice toward their intended target and present themselves as a victim. These schemers make themselves seem misunderstood and victimized to gain their target’s trust. The unwitting target then makes it his or her job to cover for the “victim,” making sure that the “victim” is protected from others.   This forms an exclusive bond between the two parties, with the manipulator effectively cutting off the target’s contact with other employees by painting them in a bad light. The target then becomes the manipulator’s personal pep squad, leaving the employee emotionally and mentally drained.   Typically, the person being manipulated in this type of relationship at work is someone who is hard working, trusting, and unfortunately, often times easy prey to a manipulator. The manipulator sees the victim as the person who is always working late and the person who always “tries to do the right thing”. The manipulator, conversely, often times is the one leaving early, skating by day-to-day, but occasionally has enough “golden opportunities” with the boss to make themselves the “favored employees”. Nearly always a gregarious and outgoing person, these manipulative people can be true terrors to those whom they manipulate.

They say in our lives we'll meet something like eighty thousand people. Most of them just in passing, sitting beside them on a bus, buying a latte from them, overtaking them too fast on the motorway. Others will become friends, lovers, family. Some will stay in our lives forever, and some will be swept away by the flow of life. But we touch all of these people in some way, tiny or huge, making more of a difference than any of us can imagine.

A venerable Japanese proverb declares, “The silkworm-moth eyebrow of a woman is the axe that cuts down the wisdom of man.” Likewise, the oldest surviving collection of Chinese poetry, The Book of Odes, features an entomological tribute to a noblewoman’s face: “Her forehead cicada-like / her eyebrows like [the antennae of] the silkworm moth / What dimples, as she artfully smiled!” Throughout China’s imperial history, the attraction of a woman’s éméi (蛾眉)—her “moth-feeler eyebrows”—was a persistent theme.

In 1963, the chaos theorist Edward Lorenz presented an often-referenced lecture entitled “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” Lorenz’s main point was that chaotic mathematical functions are very sensitive to initial conditions. Slight differences in initial conditions can lead to dramatically different results after many iterations. Lorenz believed that this sensitivity to slight differences in the beginning made it impossible to determine an answer to his question. Underlying Lorenz’s lecture was the assumption of determinism, that each initial condition can theoretically be traced as a cause of a final effect. This idea, called the “Butterfly Effect,” has been taken by the popularizers of chaos theory as a deep and wise truth. However, there is no scientific proof that such a cause and effect exists. There are no well-established mathematical models of reality that suggest such an effect. It is a statement of faith. It has as much scientific validity as statements about demons or God.

Butterfly effect.” “Right. It means small events can have large, whatchamadingit, ramifications. The idea is that if some guy kills a butterfly in China, maybe forty years later—or four hundred—there’s an earthquake in Peru. That sound as crazy to you as it does to me?” It did, but I remembered a hoary old time-travel paradox and pulled it out. “Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?” He stared at me, baffled. “Why the fuck would you do that?” That was a good question, so I just told him to go on. “You changed the past this afternoon in all sorts of little ways, just by walking into the Kennebec Fruit . . . but the stairs leading up into the pantry and back into 2011 were still there, weren’t they? And The Falls is the same as when you left it.” “So it seems, yes. But you’re talking about something a little more major. To wit, saving JFK’s life.” “Oh, I’m talking about a lot more than that, because this ain’t some butterfly in China, buddy. I’m also talking about saving RFK’s life, because if John lives in Dallas, Robert

It is among men of genius and science that Atheism alone is found, but among these alone is cherished an hostility to those errors, with which the illiterate and vulgar are infected. How small is the proportion of whose who really believe in God, to the thousands who are prevented by their occupations from ever bestowing a serious thought upon the subject, and the millions who worship butterflies, bones, feathers, monkeys, calabashes and serpents. The word God, like other abstractions, signifies the agreement of certain propositions, rather than the presence of any idea. If we found our belief in the existence of God on the universal consent of mankind, we are duped by the most palpable of sophisms. The word God cannot mean at the same time an ape, a snake, a bone, a calabash, a Trinity, and a Unity. Nor can that belief be accounted universal against which men of powerful intellect and spotless virtue have in every age protested. . . . Intelligence is that attribute of the Deity, which you hold to be most apparent in the Universe. Intelligence is only known to us as a mode of animal being. We cannot conceive intelligence distinct from sensation and perception, which are attributes to organized bodies. To assert that God is intelligent, is to assert that he has ideas; and Locke has proved that ideas result from sensation. Sensation can exist only in an organized body, an organized body is necessarily limited both in extent and operation. The God of the rational Theosophist is a vast and wise animal. . . . Thus, from the principles of that reason to which you so rashly appealed as the ultimate arbiter of our dispute, have I shewn that the popular arguments in favor of the being of God are totally destitute of colour. I have shewn the absurdity of attributing intelligence to the cause of those effects that we perceive in the Universe, and the fallacy that lurks in the argument from design. I have shewn that order is no more than a peculiar manner of contemplating the operation of necessary agents, that mind is the effect, not the cause of motion, that power is the attribute, not the origin of Being. I have proved that we can have no evidence of the existence of a God from the principles of reason.

We had good reason to be anxious, beginning anew without a clue or map, but on our backs in that unnatural whiteness, we lay peaceful as waterfront sunbathers. Our plan was loose and as undefined as the path across a beach—any route seemed possible, all effective in crossing. And a calm energy lit my heart, perceptible in my movements, which seemed slower. Justin switched off the light; momentarily spooked, I wanted to hear his voice. I spoke into dim space: “I bet you’ll do big things here too—” “I never want to work again,” he cut me off, his unexpected decree like stardust in the darkness. For a moment, the blankness of New York’s canvas took on an energetic tone of backstage butterflies.

The mythical ‘butterfly effect’ does exist, but we don’t spend enough time butterfly hunting. Here are some recent butterfly effect discoveries, from my own experience: A website adds a single extra option to its checkout procedure – and increases sales by $300m per year. An airline changes the way in which flights are presented – and sells £8m more of premium seating per year. A software company makes a seemingly inconsequential change to call-centre procedure – and retains business worth several million pounds. A publisher adds four trivial words to a call-centre script – and doubles the rate of conversion to sales. A fast-food outlet increases sales of a product by putting the price . . . up. All these disproportionate successes were, to an economist, entirely illogical. All of them worked. And all of them, apart from the first, were produced by a division of my advertising agency, Ogilvy, which I founded to look for counter-intuitive solutions to problems. We discovered that problems almost always have a plethora of seemingly irrational solutions waiting to be discovered, but that nobody is looking for them; everyone is too preoccupied with logic to look anywhere else. We also found, rather annoyingly, that the success of this approach did not always guarantee repeat business; it is difficult for a company, or indeed a government, to request a budget for the pursuit of such magical solutions, because a business case has to look logical.

They say that Ridley is a very visual director and he’s indifferent with actors. He’s obviously changed over the years, but I’ll never forget this one sequence. We had wind machines going full blast, we had unicorns, smoke effects, moonbeams coming down, we had all these pigeons dyed different colours, we had a bear eating honey, we had bees floating around, butterflies and sparrows, we had everything. We were in the studio from seven o’clock in the morning until two, without breaking for lunch, preparing this one shot. When Ridley had everything right he shouted, ‘Shoot, for Christ’s sake shoot!’ And old Bill Westley, the AD, turned around and said, ‘What about the max factors then guv?’ meaning the actors. And Ridley went, ‘Oh fuck. Quick, go and get them.’ And Bill rushed out and brought Tom Cruise and Mia Sara on and Ridley went, ‘Ah, OK Tom you sit over there and Mia you sit next to him and just talk among yourselves. OK. And action!

She hadn't gone back in time. The idea was silly. Or had she? Had she knocked on the door of her home to see a younger version of herself answer; had there been a mutual shock of recognition (as the younger Rebecca realized that, yes, her husband's work was due to be a success, that he was not wasting his time chasing rainbows and tilting at windmills); had she slipped her arm into that of her past self (feeling a slight electric tingle as skin touched skin and a taste in her mouth as if she'd touched a nine-volt battery to her tongue) and said, We need to to talk? Had she sat in a coffee shop, conversing with a woman who everyone assumed was related to her in some way—Oh my god you two are so cute, you're mother and daughter but you look like sisters? Had she made some kind of idle remark overheard by a man on his way to spend two weeks' vacation in North Dakota; had that comment convinced that man to settle there permanently instead, and to contact those who had political sympathies similar to his own? Had that unknown man begun the slow process of taking over the state by placing his allies in the local governments if he could? Had that strategy failed, leaving brute force as a regrettable last resort?

Ell's Double Down --- "The haze across the room conceals the faces of the patrons and gives the setting a secretive draping. Her heart is pounding and although she has done this for months now, she still becomes nervous starting out. She glances across the table, the man facing her is attractive he is dressed in a fine suit his eyes a warm brown, his stare deliberate. When he looks at her she can tell, it’s a look you don’t give a kid sister, his look is heated. She can hardly breathe when she looks into his eyes it is disarming, she can’t have this. She looks above him to her friend Sophie; she is unsure of herself and silently communicates her discomfort to her friend. Sophie gives her a smile then leans down whispering into the man’s ear his attention is suddenly diverted giving Ell the opportunity to settle in. She exhales feeling better now that the man is distracted. Later she will help Sophie untangle herself from him but now she has to focus on the business at hand. She takes a deep breath, flashing a dazzling smile at the rest of the men gathered around the table and antes up. The truth is gambling makes her feel empowered the rush was like none other. Each hand dealt promised her a solution to her problems. Logically that alone could be the cause for her increased heart rate and butterflies but Ell knew better. She liked the mind games played as each of them attempted to psyche out opponents seated around the table. Ell herself suffered through painful lessons until she honed her own skills. Eventually Sophie taught her the most valuable ploy --using her womanly wiles as her weapon. Ell initially felt foolish but the first time she glanced through mascaraed lashes and saw the effect she turned to her friend for additional suggestions. This combined with her ability to gauge the cards each player held or what now laid in the muck. However to be honest, she simply loved soundly beating the table full of men.

That night, she was neglecting her pen in favor of rereading one of the most-favored books in her library. It was a small volume that had appeared mysteriously when she was only fifteen. Josephine still had no idea who had gifted her the lovely horror of Carmilla, but she owed her nameless benefactor an enormous debt. Her personal guess was a briefly employed footman who had seen her reading her mother’s well-worn copy of The Mysteries of Udolpho and confessed his own forbidden love of Poe. The slim volume of Le Fanu’s Gothic horror stories had been hidden well into adulthood. As it wasn’t her father’s habit to investigate her reading choices, concealment might have been more for dramatic effect than real fear of discovery. Josephine read by lamplight, curled into an old chaise and basking in the sweet isolation of darkness as she mouthed well-loved passages from her favorite vampire tale. “For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me.” She slammed the book shut. How had she turned so morbid? For while Josephine had long known she would not live to old age, she thought she had resigned herself to it. She made a point of fighting the melancholy that threatened her. If she had any regret, it was that she would not live long enough to write all the stories she wanted. Sometimes she felt a longing to shout them into the night, offering them up to any wandering soul that they might be heard so they could live. So many voices beating in her chest. So many tales to write and whisper and shout. Her eyes fell to the book she’d slammed shut. ‘“You are afraid to die?” “Yes, everyone is.” Josephine stood and pushed her way out of the glass house, into the garden where the mist enveloped her. She lifted her face to the moon and felt the tears cold on her cheeks. “‘ Girls are caterpillars,” she whispered, “‘ when they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don’t you see?’” But the summer would never come for Josephine. She beat back the despair that threatened to envelop her. You are afraid to die? Yes, everyone is. She lifted her face and opened her eyes to the starry night, speaking her secret longing into the night. “‘ But to die as lovers may— to die together, so that they may live together.’” How she longed for love! For passion. How she ached to be seen. To be cherished. To be known. She could pour her soul onto the page and still find loneliness in the dark. She strangled her heart to keep it alive, knowing it was only a matter of time until the palest lover took her to his bosom. Already, she could feel the tightness in her chest. Tomorrow would not be a good day.

He wanted somebody to give him a chance of asserting himself. He wanted it so urgently that he fidgeted in his chair, looked at this person, then at that person, tried to break into their talk, opened his mouth and shut it again. They were talking about the fishing industry. Why did no one ask him his opinion? What did they know about the fishing industry? Lily Briscoe knew all that. Sitting opposite him, could she not see, as in an X-ray photograph, the ribs and thigh bones of the young man's desire to impress himself, lying dark in the mist of his flesh--that thin mist which convention had laid over his burning desire to break into the conversation? But, she thought, screwing up her Chinese eyes, and remembering how he sneered at women, "can't paint, can't write," why should I help him to relieve himself? There is a code of behaviour, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behoves the woman, whatever her own occupation might be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube97 were to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should certainly expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there 96 Cheated or frustrated himself. 97 The London subway. 64 smiling. "You're not planning to go to the Lighthouse, are you, Lily," said Mrs. Ramsay. "Remember poor Mr. Langley; he had been round the world dozens of times, but he told me he never suffered as he did when my husband took him there. Are you a good sailor, Mr. Tansley?" she asked. Mr. Tansley raised a hammer: swung it high in air; but realising, as it descended, that he could not smite that butterfly with such an instrument as this, said only that he had never been sick in his life. But in that one sentence lay compact, like gunpowder, that his grandfather was a fisherman; his father a chemist; that he had worked his way up entirely himself; that he was proud of it; that he was Charles Tansley--a fact that nobody there seemed to realise; but one of these days every single person would know it. He scowled ahead of him. He could almost pity these mild cultivated people, who would be blown sky high, like bales of wool and barrels of apples, one of these days by the gunpowder that was in him. "Will you take me, Mr. Tansley?" said Lily, quickly, kindly, for, of course, if Mrs. Ramsay said to her, as in effect she did, "I am drowning, my dear, in seas of fire. Unless you apply some balm to the anguish of this hour and say something nice to that young man there, life will run upon the rocks--indeed I hear the grating and the growling at this minute. My nerves are taut as fiddle strings. Another touch and they will snap"--when Mrs. Ramsay said all this, as the glance in her eyes said it, of course for the hundred and fiftieth time Lily Briscoe had to renounce the experiment--what happens if one is not nice to that young man there--and be nice.

In my youth . . . my sacred youth . . . in eaves sole sparowe sat not more alone than I . . . in my youth, my saucer-deep youth, when I possessed a mirror and both a morning and an evening comb . . . in my youth, my pimpled, shame-faced, sugared youth, when I dreamed myself a fornicator and a poet; when life seemed to be ahead somewhere like a land o’ lakes vacation cottage, and I was pure tumescence, all seed, afloat like fuzz among the butterflies and bees; when I was the bursting pod of a fall weed; when I was the hum of sperm in the autumn air, the blue of it like watered silk, vellum to which I came in a soft cloud; O minstrel galleons of Carib fire, I sang then, knowing naught, clinging to the tall slim wheatweed which lay in a purple haze along the highway like a cotton star . . . in my fumbling, lubricious, my uticated youth, when a full bosom and a fine round line of Keats, Hart Crane, or Yeats produced in me the same effect—a moan throughout my molecules—in my limeade time, my uncorked innocence, my jellybelly days, when I repeated Olio de Oliva like a tenor; then I would touch the page in wonder as though it were a woman, as though I were blind in my bed, in the black backseat, behind the dark barn, the dim weekend tent, last dance, date's door, reaching the knee by the second feature, possibly the thigh, my finger an urgent emissary from my penis, alas as far away as Peking or Bangkok, so I took my heart in my hand, O my love, O my love, I sighed, O Christina, Italian rose; my inflated flesh yearning to press against that flesh becoming Word—a word—words which were wet and warm and responsive as a roaming tongue; and her hair was red, long, in ringlets, kiss me, love me up, she said in my anxious oral ear; I read: Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour; for I had oodles of needs, if England didn't; I was nothing but skin, pulp, and pit, in my grapevine time, during the hard-on priesthood of the poet; because then—in my unclean, foreskinned, and prurient youth—I devoutly believed in Later Life, in Passion, in Poetry, the way I thought only fools felt about God, prayer, heaven, foreknowledge, sin; for what was a poem if not a divine petition, a holy plea, a prophecy: [...] a stranger among strangers, myself the strangest because I could never bring myself to enter adolescence, but kept it about like a bit of lunch you think you may eat later, and later come upon at the bottom of a bag, dry as dust, at the back of the refrigerator, bearded with mold, or caked like sperm in the sock you've fucked, so that gingerly, then, you throw the mess out, averting your eyes, just as Rainer complained he never had a childhood—what luck!—never to have suffered birthpang, nightfear, cradlecap, lake in your lung; never to have practiced scales or sat numb before the dentist's hum or picked your mother up from the floor she's bled and wept and puked on; never to have been invaded by a tick, sucked by a leech, bitten by a spider, stung by a bee, slimed on by a slug, seared by a hot pan, or by paper or acquaintance cut, by father cuffed; never to have been lost in a crowd or store or parking lot or left by a lover without a word or arrogantly lied to or outrageously betrayed—really what luck!—never to have had a nickel roll with slow deliberation down a grate, a balloon burst, toy break; never to have skinned a knee, bruised a friendship, broken trust; never to have had to conjugate, keep quiet, tidy, bathe; to have lost the chance to be hollered at, bullied, beat up (being nothing, indeed, to have no death), and not to have had an earache, life's lessons to learn, or sums to add reluctantly right up to their bitter miscalculated end—what sublime good fortune, the Greek poet suggested—because Nature is not accustomed to life yet; it is too new, too incidental, this shiver in the stone, never altogether, and would just as soon (as Culp prefers to say) cancer it; erase, strike, stamp it out— [...]

I’m a firm believer that everything happens for a reason. That there is a butterfly effect and everything that happens influences what will happen next.

ACTION WILL BE YOUR LEGACY “He who has a vehement desire for posthumous fame does not consider that every one of those who remember him will himself also die very soon…” – Marcus Aurelius We can’t escape the fact that we wish to leave the world with a reminder that we were here, too, once. On some level it doesn’t make much sense—the mind that is wishing to be remembered will probably be gone…it won’t even have a chance to think about being remembered! Some people can afford to put their name on football stadiums or tall buildings. Some people have left large tombs. Some have left autobiographies. Some have left massive fortunes. Some have left scientific breakthroughs. Some glorious son-of-a-gun out there left us the PB&J sandwich. These are great contributions. However, the accumulation of interactions you have with other people will certainly be greater. The way you are in the world matters more than what you make in the world. This is important. You spread whatever you are. If you are decisive, emotionally stable, and optimistic, then you will give others the permission to be the same. When you free yourself from overthinking and commit to action you will free others. Not by spreading the word or talking about this book (although that would be great!) but by just being that way. Think of a time when you’ve been afraid to make a leap. You look around for others who have made the leap. Then you see it’s a possibility. When you smile at someone instead of worrying about what they’re thinking about you, you make their day better—and your day better. When you do the thing you’re embarrassed to do you provide relief for everyone around who was too scared. When you believe the actions you take are more important than an abstract purpose, you may pull an onlooker out of an existential crisis with you. If you can do it, they can too. These moments multiply. The person you smiled at while waiting in line at the grocery store was planning on committing suicide later that day. Now they are second-guessing it. They may continue to live and provide good for others, who will then provide more good for others. Staying calm in the midst of an emergency will give solace to others. Now others will gain solace from them. It’s been called the butterfly effect. We, as humans, are terrible at believing what isn’t right in front of us. We sometimes feel like we’re doing nothing, like our lives don’t matter. This is impossible. If you think you can’t create any change, then you will create change by spreading the idea of hopelessness. Everything you do matters. Act accordingly.

If we hadn’t run away, perhaps we wouldn’t have fallen into the trap Cao set up for us. Was this Domino Effect or Butterfly Effect? It appeared that the outcomes were unpredictable and non-linear, fitting the Butterfly Effect model better than…

Metaphorically, Daoism anticipates something like the butterfly effect. Way-making (dao) gives rise to continuity, Continuity gives rise to difference, Difference to plurality, And plurality gives rise to the manifold of everything that is happening (wanwu) In Chinese thought, this transformation is called Dahua, the great transformation, a principle that seems to express glimpses of universal evolution.

The butterfly effect deals in the tendency of infinitesimal variations to amplify over time. You never play around with history, because the change you thought you were making for the better is likely to cause so many unforeseen ripples that it may well add up to a net loss. Too many variables to control the outcome.

Remember the Butterfly Effect. Tiny cause, huge effect. A

The butterfly effect says that if fifty people smile at once, the power of their acne-pocked cheeks can change the wind, if not the world.

The butterfly effect. Change one thing, you change everything.

I can play all sides of the field. All sexes are divine.

So, what’s your name, trailer trash?” “Skylar.” “Very cool. Boy name for a girl. I sometimes wish I would have been named Cody but spelled with an I. Just seems cooler,” she admits as she thrusts her hand out to me. “I’m Brieanna, but you can call me Brie.

That we imagine the butterfly effect would explain things in everyday life, however, reveals more than an overeager impulse to validate ideas through science. It speaks to our larger expectation that the world should be comprehensible—that everything happens for a reason, and that we can pinpoint all those reasons, however small they may be. But nature itself defies this expectation.” —Peter Dizikes, “The Meaning of the Butterfly,” The Boston Globe, June 2008

Greta’s forced inaction meant more destruction. She wished nature provided more obvious solutions for all of its creatures.

If Meg didn’t understand that to fight was to claim someone as equal, she wouldn’t explain it to her. The opposite of love wasn’t hate, but apathy.

Never underestimate the power of kindness extended toward another living being. Your positive vibe has the potential to reverberate around the world - ultimately creating a butterfly effect.

His lips grazed her earlobe---deliberately, she was sure---his hand rested on the small of her back, and she was overwhelmed by having him so near. With all the attention leveled their way, they were awkwardly conspicuous in a fashion she hated, so she deigned to act as normally as possible. She gripped the mallet, but just when she would have attempted her initial swing, Mr. Stevens reached around her, effectively trapping her in the circle of his arms. "Permit me to instruct you," he said, and chills sped down her spine. "The game goes like this." Warm and magnetic, the entire front of his body was flattened against the back of hers, and she could feel the solid plane of his chest, the curve of his abdomen as he arched over her, the strength of his legs as he balanced her between them. His groin was directly against her posterior, and the sensation produced an exhilarating swirl of butterflies that cascaded through her stomach. Wrapping her small hands in his large ones, he controlled the arc of the stick as it landed with a firm thump, and their ball careened down the hillside. "Very nice," he murmured, though she was quite sure he wasn't referring to the ball or the swing at all.