Aging and its evidence remain life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored.

History resists an ending as surely as nature abhors a vacuum; the narrative of our days is a run-on sentence, every full stop a comma in embryo. But more: like thought, like water, history is...

Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak.

Most archivists don’t like surprises. That’s why we work in the past.

In fiction: we find the predictable boring. In real life: we find the unpredictable terrifying.

… an artist should paint from the heart, and not always what people expect. Predictability often leads to the dullest work, in my opinion, and we have been bored stiff long enough I think.

The future is certain. It is just not known.

One does not have to be a philosopher to be a successful artist, but he does have to be an artist to be a successful philosopher. His nature is to view the world in an...

Predictability is not how things will go, but how they can go.

A number of our scientists boast intelligence but lack wisdom. I find those to be the predictable ones.

Just because you’re grown up and then some doesn’t mean settling into the doldrums of predictability. Surprise people. Surprise yourself. (281)

Home is not a place. Home is security, predictability, reliability, dependability, safety, permanence combined together.

Something as superfluous as “play” is also an essential feature of our consciousness. If you ask children why they like to play, they will say, “Because it’s fun.” But that invites the next question: What...

And once again, work is providing us with a comforting sense of normalcy-living and working inside of coding’s predictably segmented time/space. Simply grinding away at something makes life feel stable, even though the external particulars...

It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.

A guarantee in this life: Change! Flexibility is better than predictability!

Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary...

Economy is not baseball, where the game is always played by the same rules.

(As Plato:) There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate...