Selected patterns quotes

1. It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.

2. Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there.

3. All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.

4. The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.

5. Woes cluster. Rare are solitary woes; They love a train, they tread each other's heel.

6. It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.

7. Now, some people might look at something and let it go by, because they don't recognize the pattern and the significance. It's the sensitivity to pattern recognition that seems to me to be of great importance. It's a matter of being able to find meaning, whether it's positive or negative, in whatever you encounter. It's like a journey. It's like finding the paths that will allow you to go forward, or that path that has a block that tells you to start over again or do something else.

8. Life itself is a quotation.

9. All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

10. The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

11. It has been observed that the height of a man from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot is equal to the distance between the tips of the middle fingers of the two hands when extended in a straight line.

12. The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.

13. The methods of the natural sciences cannot be applied to human behavior because this behavior...lacks the peculiarity that characterizes events in the field of the natural sciences, viz., regularity.

14. We believe this to be the work of thieves, and I'll tell you why. The whole pattern is very reminiscent of past robberies where we have found thieves to be involved. The tell-tale loss of property - that's one of the signs we look for.

15. Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

16. The human mind delights in finding pattern-so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.

17. There are many that I know and I know it. They are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them themselves and they repeat it and I hear it. Always I listen to it. Slowly I come to understand it. Many years I listened and did not know it. I heard it, I understood it some, I did not know I heard it. They repeat themselves now and I listen to it. Every way that they do it now I hear it. Now each time very slowly I come to understand it. Always it comes very slowly the completed understanding of it, the repeating each one does to tell it the whole history of the being in each one, always now I hear it. Always now slowly I understand it.

18. These similarities would seem to suggest, among other things, that there are spiritual patterns at work in the universe, at least as far as we can tell, and these spiritual patterns announce themselves with impressive regularity wherever human hearts and minds attempt to attune themselves to the cosmos in all its radiant dimensions.

19. It's like deja vu all over again.

20. We often find that we cannot easily give up the tendency to hold rigidly to patterns of thought built up over a long time. We are then caught up in what may be called absolute necessity. This kind of thought leaves no room at all intellectually for any other possibility, while emotionally and physically, it means we take a stance in our feelings, in our bodies, and indeed, in our whole culture, of holding back or resisting. This stance implies that under no circumstances whatsoever can we allow ourselves to give up certain things or change them.

21. Richard Nixon could tell us a lot about peaking too early. He was a master of it, because it beat him every time. He never learned and neither did Bush the Elder.

22. Nah, that's just the morphic field of the local environment compensating for a Nicoll Event. Do you recall having a mishap just before any of these sightings?

23. The human organism itself seems to be hardwired for these deep spiritual patterns, although not necessarily for the specific ways that they show up in a particular religion important as those are. Rather, the human being seems imbued by the realities suggested by these cross-cultural spiritual currents and patterns, with which individual religions and spiritual movements resonate, according to their own capacities and to their own degrees of fidelity.

24. 8) History never repeats itself.

25. Dum taxat, rerum magnarum parva potest res exemplare dare et vestigia notitiai.

26. Coincidence is just the word we use when we have not yet discovered the cause. It's an illusion of the human mind, a way of saying, 'I don't know why this happened this was, and I have no intention of finding out.'

27. God destroyed the world before. Once in a flood, when Noah rode it out in the ark. And once the tower of the worlds pride was destroyed in the confusion of tongues. The other times, if there were any other times, those times are all forgotten.

28. Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

29. Evolution is a theory of organic change, but it does not imply, as many people assume, that ceaseless flux is the irreducible state of nature and that structure is but a temporary incarnation of the moment. Change is more often a rapid transition between stable states than a continuous transformation at slow and steady rates. We live in a world of structure and legitimate distinction. Species are the units of nature's morphology.

30. Life: 'The clues to the great mystery are all around us! To understand the mysteries of life you must look around and within. You will see patterns everywhere; patterns that seem to manifest themselves over and over again. These patterns exist intertwined within nature and man bridging the gap between the enigma of self and universe. You see them in spiraling galaxies and the Mandelbrot fractal of fossilized Ammonoidea; growing from the unknown to atoms to molecules to solar systems to galaxies to the paradoxical expanses of the universe with origins and destinations unknown; just like us in birth and death. The similarities of tree branches, rivers and blood veins. The power of cellular division and nuclear fission, the patterns of finger prints like endoplasmic reticulum, or a black opal's play of fire like the nebula of supernova. Moon shots are like protoplasmic lurches, while simple thoughts and observations of the nature around us take us beyond the unknown. The clues to the great mystery are all around us and deep within us.'

31. The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

32. The Ramans do everything in threes.

33. 'Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.' (Source: The Act of Creation)

34. Topology provides the synergetic means of ascertaining the values of any system of experiences. Topology is the science of fundamental pattern and structural relationships of event constellations.

35. I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species.

36. The shape of a constellation, moreover, is ephemeral. A million years ago our Homo erectus ancestors gazed out nightly at a set of very different constellations. A million years hence, our descendants will see yet other shapes in the sky, and their astrologer (if our species has not grown up and sent them packing long since) will be fabricating their oracles on the basis of a different zodiac.

37. How many times it thundered before Franklin took the hint! How many apples fell on Newton's head before he took the hint! Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly we take the hint.

38. Nell teaches aspects of parenthood never understood before. If she cries or makes a mess or decides to be contrary (and these are relatively rare), it doesn't bother. There is always Chris's silence to compare it to. What is seen now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on and on. In terms of this larger pattern the lines at the end of this book still stand. We have won it. Things are better now. You can sort of tell these things. ooolo99ikl;i.,pyknulmmmmmmmmmm 111 (This last line is by Nell. She reached around the corner of the machine and banged on the keys and then watched with the same gleam Chris used to have. If the editors preserve it, it will be her first published work.)