“
But that was life: Nobody got a guided tour to their own theme park. You had to hop on the rides as they presented themselves, never knowing whether you would like the one you were in line for...or if the bastard was going to make you throw up your corn dog and your cotton candy all over the place.
”
”
J.R. Ward (Crave (Fallen Angels, #2))
“
One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.
”
”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
“
You need to avoid certain things in your train of thought: everything random, everything irrelevant. And certainly everything self-important or malicious. You need to get used to winnowing your thoughts, so that if someone says, "What are your thinking about?" you can respond at once (and truthfully) that you are thinking this or thinking that.
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
“
Basketball Rule #2 (random text from Dad)
Hustle dig
Grind push
Run fast
Change pivot
Chase pull
Aim shoot
Work smart
Live smarter
Play hard
Practice harder
”
”
Kwame Alexander (The Crossover)
“
It is one thing to stand on the comfortable ground of placid inaction and put forth words of cynical wisdom, and another to plunge into the work itself and through strenuous experience earn the right to express strong conclusions.
”
”
John D. Rockefeller (Random Reminiscences of Men and Events)
“
Who are we really? Combinations of common chemicals that perform mechanical actions for a few years before crumbling back into the original components? Fresh new souls, drawn at random for some celestial cupboard where God keeps an unending supply?
Or the same soul, immortal and eternal, refurbished and reused through endless lives, by that thrifty Housekeeper? In Her wisdom and benevolence She wipes off the memory slates, as part of the cleaning process, because if we could remember all the things we have experienced in earlier lives, we might object to risking it again.
”
”
Barbara Michaels (The Sea King's Daughter)
“
A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery—as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source.
”
”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
“
Bullish or bearish are terms used by people who do not engage in practicing uncertainty, like the television commentators, or those who have no experience in handling risk. Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration.
”
”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto))
“
Energy sensitive people often feel special when they talk about energy. What’s missing is discernment about whether that Energy Talk helps or hinders their spiritual growth. Ironically, what’s also missing? Discernment about which type of energy is being noticed:
Often any random form of astral energy is considered superior to human wisdom, but why?
”
”
Rose Rosetree (Seeking Enlightenment in the Age of Awakening: Your Complete Program for Spiritual Awakening and More, In Just 20 Minutes a Day)
“
Our world is moving so fast and we are apt to miss so much of what is happening "right now." If we can put down our smart phones for one moment and be present to what is around us, I believe these incidental meetings and strangers who come into our lives can give us unexpected fortitude, perspective and even wisdom just when we need them the most - if we are just awake, aware and open to these new insights.
”
”
Kristin S. Kaufman (Is This Seat Taken?: Random Encounters That Change Your Life)
“
Life has no map; it's made of random events, always caused by something beyond your control.
”
”
Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
“
Random thoughts that fly away.
Where words has no place to stay.
Let it be right where they are.
Let the work of art preserve its life.
”
”
Diana Rose Morcilla
“
The random sounds we make while talking to a baby (small or big) make us feel alive, free, divine and close to God. Speaking words structured by human society makes us feel machine-like and lifeless.
”
”
Shunya
“
Sometimes life feels a certain way that we call “absurd”: nothing matters, all efforts are for naught, everything seems random and perverse, positive intention is perpetually thwarted. This stance communicates darkness and edginess, which can feel like wisdom. But we don’t live as if life is absurd; we live as if it has meaning and makes sense. We live (or try to) by kindness, loyalty, friendship, aspiration to improvement, believing the best of other people. We assume causality and continuity of logic. And we find, through living, that our actions do matter, very much. We can be a good parent or a bad parent, we can drive safely or like a maniac. Our minds can feel clean and positive and clear or polluted and negative. To have an ambition and pursue it feels healthy. A life without earnest striving is a nightmare. (When desire vanishes from a normal life, that is called depression.)
”
”
George Saunders (A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life)
“
If you can get others to believe that your random guesses are actual answers, they’ll never guess that you never understood the question in the first place.
”
”
Craig D. Lounsbrough
“
Life is governed by chance, not wisdom.
”
”
Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy)
“
Wise random strangers at bars are modern-day Oracles of Delphi, except drunk and sometimes leaving abruptly when it's their turn for karaoke.
”
”
Kelly Williams Brown (Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps)
“
Conventional wisdom nor scientific, mathematical prove of randomness in life could do nothing to deter human's curiosity for the unknown, however small the chance of a positive outcome maybe.
”
”
Vann Chow (The White Man and the Pachinko Girl)
“
But simple luck is the random birthright of the hapless. When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one thing encounters something else: the unexpected. It comes from being in a position to seize opportunity from the happy marriage of time, place, and chance.
”
”
Margot Lee Shetterly (Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race)
“
Dont act like you are walking around with a Tshirt that says "I give Up!" on the front and on the back saying "I never started trying!"
People can bring you down, situations happen, YOU can feel like Life is the shittiest thing to deal with. BLAH BLAH BLAH..
If you're walking through Hell, keep going! Everyday there's a new challenge. Face it! Deal with it! Move on! To every problem there is a solution or a way around it.. Stop being a sour mongral and think life owes you something..
No one will do anything for you these days. Start fighting. Get rid of ALL the shit people in your Life. Grow some balls of steel and work progressively through everything. Step by Step or what ever mad method you have to get you back in line again.
Who cares, if people don't like you, BURN that mother of a bridge down. It was never meant to be.. Build New ones! Many roads to cross and new paths on life to Explore..
It starts with YOU.. And if people want to judge you, tell them to F/O and look in the mirror. Time for a new game.. It's called "Take over the World" WHOOOP WHOOOP!!
”
”
Timothy Padayachee
“
The world is a glorious bounty. There is more food than can be eaten if we would limit our numbers to those who can be cherished, there are more beautiful girls than can be dreamed of, more children than we can love, more laughter than can be endured, more wisdom than can be absorbed. Canvas and pigments lie in wait, stone, wood, and metal are ready for sculpture, random noise is latent for symphonies, sites are gravid for cities, institutions lie in the wings ready to solve our most intractable problems, parables of moving power remain unformulated and yet, the world is finally unknowable.
”
”
Ian L. McHarg (Design With Nature)
“
Re-enactments may be played out in intimate relationships, work situations, repetitive accidents or mishaps, and in other seemingly random events. They may also appear in the form of bodily symptoms or psychosomatic diseases. Children who have had a traumatic experience will often repeatedly recreate it in their play. As adults, we are often compelled to re-enact our early traumas in our daily lives. The mechanism is similar regardless of the individual’s age.
”
”
Peter A. Levine (Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body)
“
You will receive your biggest blessings outside of your comfort zone. So get comfortable with constant change, feeling uneasy, and taking many calculated or random risks. Take a leap of faith.
”
”
Robin S. Baker
“
The sub-conscious mind is so powerful in such a way that even if you empty your mind of all its components, there will be a little thought; it is synonymous to a well informed person who can never be deformed.
”
”
Michael Bassey Johnson
“
Does helping others really confer happiness or prosperity on the helper? I know of no evidence showing that altruists gain money from their altruism, but the evidence suggests that they often gain happiness. People who do volunteer work are happier and healthier than those who don’t; but, as always, we have to contend with the problem of reverse correlation: Congenitally happy people are just plain nicer to begin with,24 so their volunteer work may be a consequence of their happiness, not a cause. The happiness-as-cause hypothesis received direct support when the psychologist Alice Isen25 went around Philadelphia leaving dimes in pay phones. The people who used those phones and found the dimes were then more likely to help a person who dropped a stack of papers (carefully timed to coincide with the phone caller’s exit), compared with people who used phones that had empty coin-return slots. Isen has done more random acts of kindness than any other psychologist: She has distributed cookies, bags of candy, and packs of stationery; she has manipulated the outcome of video games (to let people win); and she has shown people happy pictures, always with the same finding: Happy people are kinder and more helpful than those in the control group.
”
”
Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom)
“
We go straight". I say again. "If we start making turns, we might not know what direction is what. If we keep going straight, at least we know how to get back to where we came from if we get into trouble. I know it's tiring, but walking uphill is a good thing-every step we take is a step closer to getting out."
"I see shoulders droop, I hear heavy sighs. They don't want to agree with me; they want to go the easier way".
”
”
Scott Sigler (Alive (The Generations Trilogy, #1))
“
As all tragedies are. That’s what makes them so hard to bear. The acceptance that life is random and often cruel. We seek to attribute blame. We cannot accept that things happen without reason. That not everything is within our control. We make ourselves small gods of our own universe without any of God’s mercy, wisdom or grace.
”
”
C.J. Tudor (The Burning Girls)
“
If we look through the aperture which we have opened up onto the absolute, what we see there is a rather menacing power--something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fiercest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an interval of disquieting calm. We see an omnipotence equal to that of the Cartesian God, and capable of anything, even the inconceivable; but an omnipotence that has become autonomous, without norms, blind, devoid of the other divine perfections, a power with neither goodness nor wisdom, ill-disposed to reassure thought about the veracity of its distinct ideas. We see something akin to Time, but a Time that is inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity, even a god, even God. This is not a Heraclitean time, since it is not the eternal law of becoming, but rather the eternal and lawless possible becoming of every law. It is a Time capable of destroying even becoming itself by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis, and death.
”
”
Quentin Meillassoux (After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency)
“
Whatever wisdom I have has been hard-earned – each meaning carefully culled out of the dictionary of human experiences and emotions and put in its precise place in the matrix. Meaning doesn’t come easy. The Great Crossword Setter in the Sky is capricious and wilful, demanding absolute obedience. You can waste the better part of a lifetime arguing about the randomness of the clues, the setting of the squares, why a certain square is black and not white as you need it to be, question the whole point of doing the crossword – what, after all, is to be gained by solving it. Only after all the chattering is over and you give your complete attention to it, does the perfection of the pattern reveal itself. As is, where is, everything fits. And at the end, when it’s all done, there is no reward to be had – the joy of doing it right is all the reward there ever is. (A Deepavali Gift)
”
”
Manjul Bajaj (Another Man's Wife and Other Stories)
“
History is littered with good ideas taken too far, which are indistinguishable from bad ideas. The wisdom in having room for error is acknowledging that uncertainty, randomness, and chance—“unknowns”—are an ever-present part of life. The only way to deal with them is by increasing the gap between what you think will happen and what can happen while still leaving you capable of fighting another day.
”
”
Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money)
“
Then you understand the wide range of the totally new and unexpected creations they can sometimes come up with. Most people’s minds travel along the same road traveled by everyone else, never straying off the route of conventional wisdom. Makers know no such boundaries. They have a rare ability to make their own roads of thought. Their minds venture through the wilderness of all that exists, combining random bits of knowledge in ways that have never been imagined before.
”
”
Terry Goodkind (The First Confessor (The Legend of Magda Searus, #1))
“
You are numb. It's time to put your home in order. Give everything a place. Make it make sense. Make your room the exact opposite of the randomness of existence, the mercilessness of mortality. Life's a crapshoot. By staying calm and organized in the face of it, you will be able to find your socks when you need them.
”
”
Suzy Hopkins (What to Do When I'm Gone: A Mother's Wisdom to Her Daughter)
“
It is a fact of life that oversimplified accounts of the development of science are often necessary in its teaching. Most scientific progress is a messy, complex and slow process; only with the hindsight of an overall understanding of a phenomenon can a story be told pedagogically rather than chronologically. This necessitates the distilling of certain events and personalities from the melee: those who are deemed to have made the most important contributions. It is inevitable therefore that the many smaller or less important advances scattered randomly across hundreds of years of scientific history tend to be swept up like autumn leaves into neat piles, on top of which sit larger-than-life personalities credited with taking a discipline forward in a single jump. Sometimes this is perfectly valid, and one cannot deny the genius of an Aristotle, a Newton, a Darwin or an Einstein. But it often leaves behind forgotten geniuses and unsung heroes.
”
”
Jim Al-Khalili (The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance)
“
People like to catch lights and put them inside their jars, so they can say they're lightkeepers. They like to capture bolts of lightning, the aurora borealis, flames and rainbows. If you are any of these, your friends and family and random passersby are going to want to control you in one way or the other. Don't be captured. Don't be put into their jars.
”
”
C. JoyBell C.
“
That’s just how my brain works: words of wisdom are produced at random intervals, and always in times of great despair.
”
”
Annabel den Dekker (Ailene)
“
When someone breaks your trust.
They may randomly behave like they stopped trusting you, as a defense mechanism
”
”
John Ricardo Mazarite
“
Life is governed by chance, not wisdom.
”
”
Herman Melville (Pierre; or, The Ambiguities)
“
If light travels so fast,
How come afternoons are so long?
”
”
Charles M. Schulz
“
Always measure one’s richness by the things one chooses not to buy.
”
”
Rajesh` (Random Cosmos)
“
You're not the butcher, selling sausages. You're the cow, pre-sausage.
”
”
Oliver Markus Malloy (The Ugly Truth About Self-Publishing: Not another cookie-cutter contemporary romance (On Writing and Self-Publishing a Book, #2))
“
When your concepts about life are clear, you are on the right road to pursue truth.
”
”
Rajesh` (Random Cosmos)
“
I like to equate the mediocrity of everyday matters with the force of gravity. It pulls you downwards. For wisdom to be obtained, the escape velocity must be reached and maintained.
”
”
Rajesh` (Random Cosmos)
“
The world is too big for love to be real. There are too many people in the world to ever know, beyond everything, that you are with the right person. That your heart is as swollen as it can be. Think of all the people in China. It is unlikely anyone will ever meet all of them. How can we know for certain, that trapped inside a foreign language and thumping in a foreign heart there isn’t a love that is meant for us. The infinite possibility of existence, its limitless potential, is the proof that we need that love is nothing more than an imagination, a human folly, friendship swollen with self-importance, a final retreat from the storm of possibility. The love of our life could so easily have been someone else. It is random and accidental, haphazard and unsystematic. That which we feel for one person, clinging on to the delusion of destiny, could so easily be felt for a million people should the timing and the meetings and the mutual readiness have coalesced at some other time in some other place. Should someone else have accepted us or rejected us then everything would have been different. And once we know this, we know that all love is a lie. Not honesty but deception. Not heroism but cowardice. An unspoken agreement of mutual consolidation and compromise, a shield from possibility and a bed in which to sleep, nothing more than that. But I do still miss her.
”
”
Daniel Kitson
“
Beware the confusion between correctness and intelligibility. Part of conventional wisdom favors things that can be explained rather instantly and “in a nutshell”—in many circles it is considered law. Having attended a French elementary school, a lycée primaire, I was trained to rehash Boileau’s adage: Ce qui se conçoit bien s’énonce clairement Et les mots pour le dire viennent aisément What is easy to conceive is clear to express / Words to say it would come effortlessly.
”
”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto, #1))
“
What I have defined as a destination is most often the place I just happened to end up at. And where I just happen to end up at is not a destination in any sense of any word that I know. Rather, it is a life never lived because it was a life never planned.
”
”
Craig D. Lounsbrough
“
Remember that one day, you will die and nothing that you studied, thought of or wished to do, will ever matter. Your only contribution that would matter is how you shared your knowledge, insights, and wisdom through teaching, writing, or other comprehensible means.
”
”
Rajesh` (Random Cosmos)
“
In any random slaughter, the difference between living and dying rarely has anything to do with willpower, or wisdom, or pluck. It's just a matter of where you're standing. Two inches to the right, and the bus hits you. If your office is on the ninety-second floor instead of the ninetieth, you don't make it out in time.
”
”
Joe Hill
“
Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery—as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source.
The plant has in fact been up all night assembling little packets of sugar and seeds and fragrance and color, because when it does so its evolutionary fitness is increased. When it is successful in enticing an animal such as me to disperse its fruit, its genes for making yumminess are passed on to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than those of the plant whose berries were inferior. The berries made by the plant shape the behaviors of the dispersers and have adaptive consequences.
What I mean of course is that our human relationship with strawberries is transformed by our choice of perspective. It is human perception that makes the world a gift. When we view the world this way, strawberries and humans alike are transformed. The relationship of gratitude and reciprocity thus developed can increase the evolutionary fitness of both plant and animal.
”
”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
“
but one thing ye do not know, nor yet have investigated, to teach those to be wise who have no intellect! HIPP. A clever sophist this you speak of, who is able to compel those who have no wisdom to be rightly wise. But (for thou art arguing too refinedly on no suitable occasion) I fear, O father, lest thy tongue be talking at random through thy woes.
”
”
Euripides (The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I.)
“
If we ask a random orthodox religious person, what is the best religion, he or she would proudly claim his or her own religion to be the best. A Christian would say Christianity is the best, a Muslim would say Islam is the best, a Jewish would say Judaism is the best and a Hindu would say Hinduism is the best. It takes a lot of mental exercise to get rid of such biases.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Neurons of Jesus: Mind of A Teacher, Spouse & Thinker)
“
You hear often in stories and songs and movies about the ONE person whose love will be everything to you, who will be everything you ever needed. What you will find, however, is that people give what they have. We are wired differently, and we will give our love differently. You will find people whose love feeds your mind, and people whose love feeds your sense of humor, and people whose love you can count on at 2:00 a.m. on a random Tuesday. When you let all of those different kinds of love into your spirit, it will smooth out the rough spots, filling in the tiny spaces left behind from moments of pain and misunderstanding. One person may not fill the role of providing every kind of love you need, and that is what makes life interesting.
”
”
Patti Digh (What I Wish For You: Simple Wisdom for a Happy Life)
“
The moral of the story is this: It takes an ill-advised mix of ignorance, arrogance, and profit motive to dismiss the wisdom of the human body in favor of some random notion you’ve hatched or heard and branded as true. By wisdom I mean the collective improvements of millions of years of evolution. The mind objects strongly to shit, but the body has no idea what we’re on about.
”
”
Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
“
In a tree-shaded pasture, seventeen adult tortoises randomly stood around. As I fed them spinach leaves sold by an opportune vendor, they tolerated my gentle strokes to their boney skullcaps and the warm black skin on their necks. It was as thin and delicate as the skin on a grandmother’s hand. Their obsidian black eyes gleamed with deep wisdom and patience—Dalai Lamas on the half shell. Back
”
”
Kristine K. Stevens (If Your Dream Doesn't Scare You, It Isn't Big Enough: A Solo Journey Around the World)
“
Those then who know not wisdom and virtue, and are always busy with gluttony and sensuality, go down and up again as far as the mean; and in this region they move at random throughout life, but they never pass into the true upper world; thither they neither look, nor do they ever find their way, neither are they truly filled with true being, nor do they taste of pure and abiding pleasure. Like cattle, with their eyes always looking down and their heads stooping to the earth, that is, to the dining-table, they fatten and feed and breed, and, in their excessive love of these delights, they kick and butt at one another with horns and hoofs which are made of iron; and they kill one another by reason of their insatiable lust. For they fill themselves with that which is not substantial, and the part of themselves which they fill is also unsubstantial and incontinent.
”
”
Plato (Republic)
“
It is right that creation should exist as he has made it and as we see it happening, because this is his will, which no one would deny. For if the movement of the universe were irrational, and the world rolled on in random fashion, one would be justified in disbelieving what we say. But if the world is founded on reason, wisdom and science, and is filled with orderly beauty, then it must owe its origin and order to none other than the Word of God.
”
”
Athanasius of Alexandria
“
Order Out of Chaos ... At the right temperature ... two peptide molecules will stay together long enough on average to find a third. Then the little trio finds a fourth peptide to attract into the little huddle, just through the random side-stepping and tumbling induced by all the rolling water molecules. Something extraordinary is happening: a larger structure is emerging from a finer system, not in spite of the chaotic and random motion of that system but because of it.
Without the chaotic exploration of possibilities, the rare peptide molecules would never find each other, would never investigate all possible ways of aggregating so that the tape-like polymers emerge as the most likely assemblies. It is because of the random motion of all the fine degrees of freedom that the emergent, larger structures can assume the form they do. Even more is true when the number of molecules present becomes truly enormous, as is automatically the case for any amount of matter big enough to see. Out of the disorder emerges a ... pattern of emergent structure from a substrate of chaos....
The exact pressure of a gas, the emergence of fibrillar structures, the height in the atmosphere at which clouds condense, the temperature at which ice forms, even the formation of the delicate membranes surrounding every living cell in the realm of biology -- all this beauty and order becomes both possible and predictable because of the chaotic world underneath them....
Even the structures and phenomena that we find most beautiful of all, those that make life itself possible, grow up from roots in a chaotic underworld. Were the chaos to cease, they would wither and collapse, frozen rigid and lifeless at the temperatures of intergalactic space.
This creative tension between the chaotic and the ordered lies within the foundations of science today, but it is a narrative theme of human culture that is as old as any. We saw it depicted in the ancient biblical creation narratives of the last chapter, building through the wisdom, poetic and prophetic literature. It is now time to return to those foundational narratives as they attain their climax in a text shot through with the storm, the flood and the earthquake, and our terrifying ignorance in the face of a cosmos apparently out of control. It is one of the greatest nature writings of the ancient world: the book of Job.
”
”
Tom McLeish (Faith and Wisdom in Science)
“
I GUIDE YOU IN THE WAY OF WISDOM AND LEAD you along straight paths. I know how confused you sometimes feel—and how much you long to find the way forward. You have tried so many different things; you have been so hopeful at times. Yet your hope-filled paths have led to disappointment. I want you to know that I fully understand how hard your journey has been. I also assure you that I can bring good out of every bit of it. This is the way of wisdom: trusting Me no matter what happens in your life. It is through trust that you follow Me along the right path. There are many things that seem random or wrong as you go along your journey. Yet I am able to fit them all into a comprehensive plan for good—My Master Plan. So don’t be fooled by the way things appear at a given point in time. You are looking at only a very small piece of a massively big picture. From your limited perspective, your journey may be confusing, with puzzling twists and turns. However, from My limitless, big-picture perspective, I am indeed leading you along straight paths.
”
”
Sarah Young (Jesus Today: Experience Hope Through His Presence)
“
The point is that if you think you can pinpoint the cause, then you can fool yourself into thinking you can avert the cause. It's deeply egotistical. It's life played as a grand insurance policy. Our myth-making around cancer stems from the same impulse. Because we don't know exactly why most of it happens, we weave a makeshift wisdom around it, a false prophet, which seeps into the common story and feeds our hunger to understand why. The guilt is a byproduct, a way to assign blame and seek absolution. It's a lesser evil than the forces of randomness. And it gives us the illusion of control.
”
”
Alanna Mitchell (Malignant Metaphor: Confronting Cancer Myths)
“
The sole cause of their tragic sufferings was their obvious and complete contempt of the pursuits of immortal men which my teaching had instilled in them. It is hardly surprising if we are driven by the blasts of storms when our chief aim on this sea of life is to displease wicked men. And though their numbers are great, we can afford to despise them because they have no one to lead them and are carried along only by ignorance which distracts them at random first one way then another. When their forces are in superior numbers, our general conducts a tactical withdrawal of his forces to a strong point, and they are left to encumber themselves with useless plunder. Safe from their furious activity or our ramparts above, we can smile at their efforts to collect all the most useless booty: our citadel cannot fall to the assaults of folly
”
”
Boethius (The Consolation of Philosophy)
“
In one of her most influential studies, she and her team tracked the emotional experiences of nearly two hundred people over years of their lives. The subjects spanned a broad range of backgrounds and ages. (They were from eighteen to ninety-four years old when they entered the study.) At the beginning of the study and then every five years, the subjects were given a beeper to carry around twenty-four hours a day for one week. They were randomly paged thirty-five times over the course of that week and asked to choose from a list all the emotions they were experiencing at that exact moment.
If Maslow’s hierarchy was right, then the narrowing of life runs against people’s greatest sources of fulfillment and you would expect people to grow unhappier as they age. But Carstensen’s research found exactly the opposite. The results were unequivocal. Far from growing unhappier, people reported more positive emotions as they aged. They became less prone to anxiety, depression, and anger. They experienced trials, to be sure, and more moments of poignancy—that is, of positive and negative emotion mixed together. But overall, they found living to be a more emotionally satisfying and stable experience as time passed, even as old age narrowed the lives they led.
The findings raised a further question. If we shift as we age toward appreciating everyday pleasures and relationships rather than toward achieving, having, and getting, and if we find this more fulfilling, then why do we take so long to do it? Why do we wait until we’re old? The common view was that these lessons are hard to learn. Living is a kind of skill. The calm and wisdom of old age are achieved over time.
Carstensen was attracted to a different explanation. What if the change in needs and desires has nothing to do with age per se? Suppose it merely has to do with perspective—your personal sense of how finite your time in this world is. This idea was regarded in scientific circles as somewhat odd. But Carstensen had her own reason for thinking that one’s personal perspective might be centrally important
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Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
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Chapter One Vivek Ranadivé “IT WAS REALLY RANDOM. I MEAN, MY FATHER HAD NEVER PLAYED BASKETBALL BEFORE.” 1. When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and he would persuade the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense. The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans play basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would pass the ball in from the sidelines and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A regulation basketball court is ninety-four feet long. Most of the time, a team would defend only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally teams played a full-court press—that is, they contested their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they did it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, Ranadivé thought, and that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that they were so good at? Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Ranadivé lives in Menlo Park, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. His team was made up of, as Ranadivé put it, “little blond girls.” These were the daughters of nerds and computer programmers. They worked on science projects and read long and complicated books and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé had come to America as a seventeen-year-old with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press—every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.” 2. Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries. Let’s say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in population and armed might
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Malcolm Gladwell (David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants)
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Even if they were able to change everything about that night, he and Glory had made enough mistakes together to learn that some of the darkest deeds in history accidentally handed victory to goodness. And when he had randomly doled out preemptive justice to villains before their villainy occurred, trying to make every past moment a paradise, he could accidentally tip the scales the wrong way. Retribution was for the end of time, and final justice was well beyond both his wisdom and authority.
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N.D. Wilson (The Last of the Lost Boys (Outlaws of Time, #3))
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Society has the choice of whether to fight our natural and inherited abilities or channel them effectively. When we use the common sense of nature in our upbringing of boys, we work with boys not against them, and give them the love, structure, discipline, and wisdom they, as boys, need. When we accomplish this, we don’t create more random violence, we ensure less of it; we don’t make boys into men who victimize women, we ensure less victimization of women. In our lives as parents, mentors, and educators, we stop feeling as if we’re fighting against boys and masculinity; we start realizing how to work with boys and maleness. Consequently, our homes, schools, streets, and bedrooms start looking very different.
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Michael Gurian (Saving Our Sons: A New Path for Raising Healthy and Resilient Boys)
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So, am I too, like all other humans, just a rogue? Sure! Just a notch less than those rascals wearing godly robes.
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Fakeer Ishavardas
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I was grateful I'd been in a plane crash. I got to see my grandfather every single day for months. If that plane hadn't plummeted, we would have stalled at spaghetti Tuesdays.
And that's the truth.
...
And I didn't ask God why I was in the random plane crash that caused Grandpa to come and live with us.
I just bit my lip and said, Thank you.
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Karen Harrington (Mayday)
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Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery—as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source.
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Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
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Borrowed wisdom can be vicious. I need to make a huge effort not to be swayed by well-sounding remarks.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto, #1))
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Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward; you cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present. Gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery - as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source.
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Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
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The acceptance that life is random and often cruel. We seek to attribute blame. We cannot accept that things happen without reason. That not everything is within our control. We make ourselves small gods of our own universe without any of God’s mercy, wisdom or grace.
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C.J. Tudor (The Burning Girls)
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One thing I've learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.
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Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
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Is it possible that the purpose of all things random is to show us that nothing really is?
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Craig D. Lounsbrough
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Randomness rests in our inability to discern purpose at work.
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Craig D. Lounsbrough
“
Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity John Gribbin, Random House (2005) F.F.I.A.S.C.O.: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader Frank Partnoy, Penguin Books (1999) Ice Age John & Mary Gribbin, Barnes & Noble (2002) How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It Arthur Herman, Three Rivers Press (2002) Models of My Life Herbert A. Simon The MIT Press (1996) A Matter of Degrees: What Temperature Reveals About the Past and Future of Our Species, Planet, and Universe Gino Segre, Viking Books (2002) Andrew Carnegie Joseph Frazier Wall, Oxford University Press (1970) Guns Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Jared M. Diamond, W. W. Norton & Company The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal Jared Nt[. Diamond, Perennial (1992) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Robert B. Cialdini, Perennial Currents (1998) The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Benjamin franklin, Yale Nota Bene (2003) Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos Garrett Hardin, Oxford University Press (1995) The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Press (1990) Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. Ron Chernow, Vintage (2004) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor David Sandes, W. W Norton & Company (1998) The Warren Buffett Portfolio: Mastering the Power of the Focus Investment Strategist Robert G. Hagstrom, Wiley (2000) Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters Matt Ridley, Harper Collins Publishers (2000) Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giz.ting In Roger Fisher, William, and Bruce Patton, Penguin Books Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information Robert Wright, Harper Collins Publishers (1989) Only the Paranoid Survive Andy Grove, Currency (1996 And a few from your editor... Les Schwab: Pride in Performance Les Schwab, Pacific Northwest Books (1986) Men and Rubber: The Story of Business Harvey S. Firestone, Kessinger Publishing (2003) Men to Match My Mountains: The Opening of the Far West, 1840-1900 Irving Stone, Book Sales (2001)
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Peter D. Kaufman (Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, Expanded Third Edition)
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I usually struggle to answer many questions people ask because my mind is always in the future, while the questions they ask are always in the past, or at best, in the present. That is a very factual way of observing the spiritual level of someone. The "what job you have?" and "how much money do you make?" that people stuck in a present time loop obsessively ask is based on what they see, while the "where are you from?" and "what did you study?" comes from people stuck in the past, and with the idea that the past conditions the present, not your decisions. The first thinks matter controls life and the second that life is the result of randomity and chaos. Both represent the vast majority of the population and both are absolutely stupid. As they are too stupid to perceive the future, they call it dreaming, insanity or, at best, motivation and inspiration. They don't know what consciousness is, even when using this word. Thus, every change is for them like a spontaneous miracle, or a mistake in the system that shouldn't have occurred. They look at those who break their mental laws as criminals because when someone is too stupid, he perceives knowledge as a threat to his values. Jealousy and competition come precisely from this state of mind. These subhumans think like a character of a video game that is trapped in a world that never changes and in which they have no capacity to make effective decisions. When they are faced with a library or a religion that promotes wisdom, they close their eyes to escape or read about fantasies, because they are not mentally capable of processing reality.
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Dan Desmarques
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At some point I came across a well-cited study that indicated that light drinking in pregnancy—perhaps a drink a day—causes aggressive behavior in children. The study wasn’t randomized; they just compared women who drank to women who did not. When I looked a little closer, I found that the women who drank were also much, much more likely to use cocaine. We know that cocaine is bad for your child—
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Emily Oster (Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong-and What You Really Need to Know)
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Ancient wisdom places emphasis on hard work, which is a form of penance.
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Ramaswamy Thanu (Random Thoughts on Management)
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Every life is a unique random business
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Bangambiki Habyarimana (The Great Pearl of Wisdom)
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It would be a completely inconvenient time to go to the computer and write it all down. I ignored some ideas, and then became frustrated because I couldn’t find the information again later or grab it back. I eventually learned to just go write it down now because Spirit does not exist on a timeline and only delivers insights in the most perfect ways. It was my responsibility to trust the timing. Responsibility is the ability to act and I had that ability, even while unloading the dishwasher, or folding laundry, or trying to get some random things done around the house, or driving on the freeway. YEP, I’m livin’ the glamorous dream!
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Molly McCord (Conscious Messages: Spiritual Wisdom and Inspirations For Awakening)
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Random thoughts and knowledge come along as you fly!
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Sagar Waingankar (Rhythms!)
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Internet, with would-be prophets daily haranguing their audience and megalomaniacs trying to push bizarre ideas, that eventually people will cherish a new commodity: wisdom. Random facts do not correlate with wisdom, and in the future people will be tired of the rants of mad bloggers and will seek out respected sites that offer this rare commodity of wisdom.
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Anonymous
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PROBLEMS IN YOUR LIFE. Though many things feel random and wrong, remember that I am sovereign over everything. I can fit everything into a pattern for good, but only to the extent that you trust Me. Every problem can teach you something, transforming you little by little into the masterpiece I created you to be. The very same problem can become a stumbling block over which you fall, if you react with distrust and defiance. The choice is up to you, and you will have to choose many times each day whether to trust Me or defy Me. The best way to befriend your problems is to thank Me for them. This simple act opens your mind to the possibility of benefits flowing from your difficulties. You can even give persistent problems nicknames, helping you to approach them with familiarity rather than with dread. The next step is to introduce them to Me, enabling Me to embrace them in My loving Presence. I will not necessarily remove your problems, but My wisdom is sufficient to bring good out of every one of them. We are assured and know that [God being a partner in their labor] all things work together and are [fitting into a plan] for good to and for those who love God and are called according to [His] design and purpose. ROMANS 8 : 28 (AMP) But we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 1 CORINTHIANS 1 : 23 – 24
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Sarah Young (Jesus Calling, with Scripture References: Enjoying Peace in His Presence (A 365-Day Devotional) (Jesus Calling®))
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Gaining wisdom is not a random occurence. One must live and study to obtain that which eludes so many.
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James Brown
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If anybody tells says you have to follow his or her #religion or you're going to hell, tell that silly ass to go to hell. Be well.
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Fakeer Ishavardas
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Doesn't it blow your mind that God thought of you? You were not a random birth. You were created in the mind of God. He named you and then wrote your name on the palm of His hands. He has counted every hair on your head and collected every tear you have cried ~ that is how precious you are to Him. Remember, this is a soul dance and our partner, our Father, is waltzing us back home. When we stumble ~ we learn how to get up. When we fall off the cliff ~ we learn how to fly. Remember if you're afraid of stumbling you will never get to fall, you will never fly, and oh I tell you, you don't want to miss that adventure, by the way, they are all adventures. So, stumble my child, skin your knees and elbows, let go, let God and when you come to the edge of that cliff....Fall....
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Aleece Walz (Words of Wisdom with The Dalai Mama: A Daily Journey Filled with Wit, Humor & Food for the Soul)
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Learning to listen to your intuition may be new for you, especially if you haven’t mastered the skill. Your intuition isn’t a random feeling. Your intuition is a deep knowing that comes from a sacred space of higher wisdom and discernment.
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Dana Arcuri (Intuitive Guide: How to Trust Your Gut, Embrace Divine Signs, & Connect with Heavenly Messengers)
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He blames himself for his daughter’s death, even though it wasn’t his fault. Just an unforeseeable tragedy. As all tragedies are. That’s what makes them so hard to bear. The acceptance that life is random and often cruel. We seek to attribute blame. We cannot accept that things happen without reason. That not everything is within our control. We make ourselves small gods of our own universe without any of God’s mercy, wisdom or grace.
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C.J. Tudor (The Burning Girls)
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Quotes are like pebble stone thrown into the sea alike mind. Don't let all reach bottom ,some should be sent back to the shore.
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P Sarda
“
the inclination to amass information can become an end in itself. It is all too easy to default to collecting more and more content without regard to whether it is useful or beneficial to us. This is indiscriminate consumption of information, treating every meme and random post on social media as if it was just as important as the most profound piece of wisdom. It is driven by fear—the fear of missing out on some crucial fact, idea, or story that everyone is talking about. The paradox of hoarding is that no matter how much we collect and accumulate, it’s never enough. The lens of scarcity also tells us that the information we already have must not be very valuable, compelling us to keep searching externally for what’s missing inside.
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Tiago Forte (Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential)
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Whatever I know
changes as I grow..
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Ramesh Sood (Untitled: Life's Random Lessons)
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Just an unforseeable tragedy. All tradgedies are. That's what makes them so hard to bear. The acceptance that life is random and often cruel. We seek to attribute blame. We cannot accept that things happen without reason. That not everything is within our control. We make ourselves small gods of our own universe without any God's mercy, wisdom, or grace.
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C.J. Tudor (The Burning Girls)
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Borrowed wisdom can be vicious. I need to make a huge effort not to be swayed by well-sounding remarks. I remind myself of Einstein’s remark that common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age eighteen.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto, #1))
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By generalization, I started to label a rare event as any behavior where the adage “beware of calm waters” can hold. Popular wisdom often warns of the old neighbor who appears to remain courtly and reserved, the model of an excellent citizen, until you see his picture in the national paper as a deranged killer who went on a rampage.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto, #1))
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Not every person shall know your life and yet, you may learn a tonne if you have your eyes and ears open.
Sometimes, the most random conversations with the most seemingly unmatchable people can tutor you about your own self and life, provided you are open to listening and understanding what the other has to say.
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Vidhu Kapur (DO WE MAKE FRIENDS AFTER SCHOOL?)
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THIRD EYE CHAKRA MEANING The Ajna chakra, energetically located between the eyebrows, is the sixth chakra. It represents your insight, wisdom, and developed intellect. SIGNIFICANCE This chakra is essential to transforming your knowledge and random, undigested information to wisdom and calculated, digested truth, thus bringing you closer to Yoga.
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Rina Jakubowicz (The Yoga Mind: 52 Essential Principles of Yoga Philosophy to Deepen Your Practice)
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You don't have to read these words. You can see them as just random patterns of white colour on black background. Similarly, you don't have to engage with the thoughts. You can see them as random patterns of energy in Time and Space.
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Shunya
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Every grain of sands has an intricate role to play in this marvelous masterpiece called life. Nothing is random, respect all happenings.
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Micheline Jean Louis - Author of Poetry My Saving Grace
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Everything said will be true from the perceived reality of the source. Even if it is opposite to what I think, it could be true in some context. I can stay calm and not lose balance and avoid judgment while sharing my thought which comes from my perceived reality.
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Ramesh Sood (Untitled Life’s Random Lessons : A tapestry of anecdotes on life, mindset, leadership, communication and relationships.)
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One thing I've learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as 'random'. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.
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Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
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I gradually learned the truth from the wisdom of random legends or the errors of major philosophies, when I could have learned it in my Sunday School material,
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G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy: A Modern Translation)
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About the “Direct Path” (直通の位の事) ◎ Jikitsū-no-kurai (“direct path”) is the soul of combat.15 All the teachings I have outlined above are like parts of the human body.16 Nothing more is needed. They must never be neglected. Depending on the situation, there are times when some techniques will not be suitable, but nothing will work without them [in your repertoire]. For example, the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, hands and feet are what our bodies are comprised of. If one of these things is missing, then we are incomplete. The sword techniques that I have conveyed must all be committed to memory and used intuitively. Without the soul and spirit of the “direct path,” they amount to random madness. In all the techniques, be sure to seize the initiative and take the attack to the enemy. This will enable you to identify target areas. You must then determine what techniques or guards will be effective and what are not viable in a particular situation. Gauge how to close the distance, then commit with single-minded resolve to follow through to your mark (star) and attack without deviating. For example, even if you have to deflect the whole world, the flight of your sword must not diverge from its path. Purge yourself of fear. When you know the moment for that one [direct and decisive] strike of jikitsū, let the power surge through you to deliver the cut. It is no different when you enter the opponent’s space to arrest him. Advance rapidly, thinking of nothing other than grabbing hold of him. The further in you get, the better. Without the mind of “direct path,” your swords will be lifeless. Even this and discover what it means. Even retreat counts as a loss. When we speak of the “interior” (deepest principles), nothing is deeper than this. When we talk of the gateway (fundamental principles), nothing is more fundamental than this. The great monk Kūkai17 traveled deep into the mountain when planning to construct a monastery in the innermost reaches of Mount Kōya. Thinking it was still not far enough, he continued walking further, but eventually came across dwellings again. He said, “The further I entered, the closer I came to human habitation; I had looked too far in.”18 The interior is not the interior. The gate is not the gate. There are no special, secret interior teachings to look for if the great wisdom of combat strategy surges through your sinews and veins. Just make sure that nobody to your front or back can ever get the better of you. This cannot be conveyed with words and letters.
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Alexander Bennett (The Complete Musashi: The Book of Five Rings and Other Works)