Nature should be idealised not copied.

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines...

…an age-old patter that seemed like chaos but was not…

It’s human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation.

If patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives — and they do — then the law of harmony insists that the most harmonious of all patterns, circles within circles, will most often assert itself.

The patterns we perceive are determined by the stories we want to believe.

Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage. Truth is outside of all patterns.

Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it! We’ve started and...

I can see patterns in events, and behaviors; in mathematics, I follow slower

Perceiving the world as well designed and thus the product of a designer, and even seeing divine providence in the daily affairs of life, may be the product of a brain adapted to finding patterns...

I like it that order exists somewhere even if it shatters near me.

[The] tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic, and political patterns…We are now…only beginning to explore the potentialities which it offers for...

When Art struggles, it succeeds; when revelling in its own successes, it as singularly fails.

Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.

Pay attention to the intricate patterns of your existence that you take for granted.

ConnubialBecause with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I’ve mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was...

To attempt to build up theories of art, or to form a new style, would be an act of supreme folly. It would be at once to reject the experiences and accumulated knowledge of thousands...

Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a...

There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos...

Patterns repeat themselves in history

America’s intellectual community has never been very bright. Or honest. They’re all sheep, following whatever the intellectual fashion of the decade happens to be. Demanding that everyone follow their dicta in lockstep. Everyone has to...

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

There’s a sameness to streetlife. On every world I’ve ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behavior seeping out from whatever clanking...

The Egyptians are inferior only to themselves. In all other styles we can trace a rapid ascent from infancy, founded on some bygone style, to a culminating point of perfection, when the foreign influence was...

If we want to grow, the way to break a pattern of negativity is to face anything negative with love.

Perhaps after all, for all our talk of change, redemption or personal growth, for all our dependence on therapists, religious faith or mood-altering drugs both legal and non, we’re doomed simply to go on repeating...

It’s difficult to know where to begin, sir.”Yes, the beginning is the tricky part. But perhaps there is no beginning, perhaps we can’t look that far back.’ He got up from his desk and went...

No marriage stays in the same pattern forever. It is both the best feature of marriage and the worst, that it inevitably changes.

Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought....

It is easy to surround yourself with people who think in the same ways, believe the same ideas, and live life in similar patterns. Many communities are made up of the same kind of people...

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

I do believe in fate, Anne-not the blind fate that gives one no freedom of choice, but a fate that sets down a pattern for each of our lives and gives us choices, numerous choices,...

Rhythm. Life is full of it; words should have it, too. But you have to train your ear. Listen to the waves on a quiet night; you’ll pick up the cadence. Look at the patterns...

A climate’s changes are tough to quantify. Butterflies can help. Entomologists prefer “junk species–” the kind of butterflies too common for most collections– to keep up with what’s going on in the insect’s world. They’re...

Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water,Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light,Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter…Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.Walking alone…was it splendor, or...

If we experience any failures or setbacks, we do not forget them because they offend our self-esteem. Instead we reflect on them deeply, trying to figure out what went wrong and discern whether there are...

I wonder at the starry pattern in the skyAre they little pieces of moon which want to fly..?

Sometimes you can grow more in a shorter amount of time with the right company than years of soul-searching alone, or by living the same patterns you’ve lived for your entire life.

Noise is any pattern we don’t understand. […] If we perceive something as noise, it’s most likely a failure of ourselves, not a failure of the universe.

We make patterns, we share moments.

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope,...

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It’s part of our DNA. That’s why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.

Perhaps we can recognize our way out of patterns rather than repeating our way out of them.

I look for patterns that nobody else does. Like I noticed that my face looks like a tablecloth. Especially when I have food all over it.