Talk to people no one else is talking to.
Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.
So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.
Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.
The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.
Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about.
We could not, for example, arrive at a principle like that of entropy without introducing some additional principle, such as randomness, to this topography.
I listen to Radio 4 and put the iPod on shuffle. I like the randomness of, say, the Stones, then something from Nina Simone, Nick Drake or Bob Dylan.
Randomness scares people. Religion is a way to explain randomness.
Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act - if you can't control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
What people fear most about tragedy is its randomness - a taxi cab jumps the curb and hits a pedestrian, a gun misfires and kills a bystander. Better to have some rational cause and effect between incident and injury. And if cause and effect aren't possible, better that there at least be some reward for all the suffering.
Expose yourself to as much randomness as possible.
We all experience many freakish and unexpected events - you have to be open to suffering a little. The philosopher Schopenhauer talked about how out of the randomness, there is an apparent intention in the fate of an individual that can be glimpsed later on. When you are an old guy, you can look back, and maybe this rambling life has some through-line. Others can see it better sometimes. But when you glimpse it yourself, you see it more clearly than anyone.
Talk to people no one else is talking to. Who would have thought that giving a speech at a funeral at age 12 would introduce me to a man who would introduce me to my first business contact who would introduce me to several other important people in my life. That's luck. That's randomness.
While in theory randomness is an intrinsic property, in practice, randomness is incomplete information.
Randomness I love. And I still love just a holler right in the middle of an ongoing narrative. Pain or joy, ecstasy.
When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.
Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans.
This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing.
We understand tornadoes scientifically, but it still feels supernatural. The randomness makes it feel supernatural.
or simply:
