Probabilities Quotes

“With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.”
― Aristotle, Poetics

“What was a shadow, after all, but a shape in the moving world reduced to a projection of possibilities?”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Conservation of Shadows

“Here's the thing, Sorrengail. Hope is a fickle, dangerous thing. It steals your focus and aims it toward the possibilities instead of keeping it where it belongs- on the probabilities.'

'So I'm supposed to what? Not hope that I live? Just plan for death?'

'You're supposed to focus on the things that can kill you so you find ways not to die.”
― Rebecca Yarros, Fourth Wing

“Stop living the life with possibilities and probabilities, live the life with certainties.”
― Amit Kalantri

“Classical mechanics gave us a deterministic view of the world. Quantum mechanics, conversely, gives us a probabilistic view instead. According to Newton, if you know the cause af an event, you can predict the outcome. According to M.Born, you can only predict how likely that outcome will be.”
― Leonid V. Azaroff

“Behind each door of what-if lies an unanswerable question that unhinges an infinite Rube Goldberg machine of probabilities. The life we have is the only one we will ever know, and even that with tenuous certainty.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“A brick can be used to represent the zero probability of this book being any good.”
― Amy Riekhof, A bit of rubbish about a Brick and a Blanket

“The anti-precog has to be present when the precog is in the process of deciding, not after. The anti-precog makes all futures seem equally real to the precog; he aborts his talent to choose at all. A precog is instantly aware when an anti-precog is nearby because his entire relation to the future is altered. In the case of telepaths a similar impairment—” “She goes back in time,” G. G. Ashwood said. Joe stared at him. “Back in time,” G.G. repeated, savoring this; his eyes shot shafts of significance to every part of Joe Chip’s kitchen. “The precog affected by her still sees one predominant future; like you said, the one luminous possibility. And he chooses it, and he’s right. But why is it right? Why is it luminous? Because this girl—” He shrugged in her direction. “Pat controls the future; that one luminous possibility is luminous because she’s gone into the past and changed it. By changing it she changes the present, which includes the precog; he’s affected without knowing it and his talent seems to work, whereas it really doesn’t. So that’s one advantage of her anti-talent over other anti-precog talents. The other—and greater—is that she can cancel out the precog’s decision after he’s made it.”
― Philip K. Dick, Ubik

“One should not inquire too closely where ancient legends about the gods are concerned; many things which reason rejects acquire some color of probability once you bring a god into the story”
― Arrian, The Campaigns of Alexander

“You can flip a coin but Schrodinger's pet cat will still be in that box.”
― Scott Edward Shjefte

“Wavefunction collapse is a generator of knowledge: it is not so much a process that gives us the answers, but is the process by which answers are created. The outcome of that process can’t, in general, be predicted with certainty, but quantum mechanics gives us a method for calculating the probabilities of particular outcomes. That’s all we can ask for.”
― Philip Ball, Beyond Weird

“[T]he probabilistic nature of the Schrödinger equation, which predicts only the likelihood of different experimental outcomes, leaves it offering no reason why one specific outcome is observed instead of another. In effect, it says that quantum events (the radioactive decay of an atom, say) happen for no reason.”
― Philip Ball, Beyond Weird

“Somehow, we believe that we have a better chance of winning a game of probabilities, totally disregarding that everybody who is playing the game has the same possibility of winning.”
― Naved Abdali

“A trader needs to be highly skilled and extremely lucky to beat the market consistently. If a trader is highly skilled but not lucky enough or extremely lucky but modestly skilled, he will beat the market occasionally but not consistently. Traders that are modestly skilled and modestly lucky will briefly beat the market but will be behind the market most of the time. Everybody else will lose money on a long-term basis, that is, 90% of the traders.”
― Naved Abdali

“When you flip a coin there is a very small but finite chance you will never ever see that coin again.”
― Scott Edward Shjefte

“The feeling that something can’t be done is often based on the fact that we’ve bypassed how it actually could be done. And we’ve done that because we’ve paid far too much attention to those who paid far too much attention to fear.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“All probabilities have
stacked up to this imminent form, and
all causes have aligned according to
this pathway and not another. I could
otherwise have been another complex
of particles, another material altogether,
and perhaps also another form, for how
much does the material influence the
fingers that shape it? Does the material
similarly shape the whims of its
sculptor?”
― Ashim Shanker, trenches parallax leapfrog

“Fate laughs at probabilities.”
― Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

“Over the long run, outcomes are governed by probabilities.”
― Naved Abdali

“A good thing to do is to think about what people have done. Not only people that you've read about in books or seen on the news or heard mentioned in deliberate conversation, and not only deeds that are noteworthy. It's good to think about all the possibilities of what people have probably done. The scope of what's possible, statistical probabilities of unique behavior and unusual action in the 200,000 years that people have existed because there are more than 7 billion of us alive right now and that's not including the number of people who have ever lived. Within those numbers exist captivating, eccentric, strange, fanciful variation, when you consider what people have probably done. Like, every time you've had an impulse that you've held back, imagine that there has been a person who has had that same impulse and gone through with it, because there probably has been. Imagine any type of person and any type of story having happened because when you do that, it feels like you're creating, but you're probably not. Imagine, considering the magnitude of these numbers and the variables within each human being, that all possibilities have occurred. If physical anomalies like twins born with bodies totally fused together resembling two-headed, eight limbed, human spiders, or a man born with a shrunken female head affixed to the back of his own head, which was animated without being consciously controlled by him, then imagine that anything you can imagine has occurred. However typical or atypical, these things you're imagining have happened. These people you're thinking of have been.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“There may very well have been a tennis player named Dennis whose only reason for playing tennis was for the thrill of the rhyme. There may have even been two Tennis Dennises. In fact, with billions and billions of people, 200,000 years, give or take the years before tennis was a sport, there may have even been three.
You might find that thinking this way expands your freedom, your consideration of your own capability, the spectrum of what all people can be, and can do.”
― Ani Baker, Handsome Vanilla

“He had convinced himself of a ‘truth’, mostly because it was able to be seen. To see something meant that it was probable, and to consider something probable meant that it was believable.”
― H.C. Roberts, Harp and the Lyre: Extraction

“The impossible is the rumor of the fearful.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough