Predictability Quotes

“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 moment — that which they cannot anticipate.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak.”
― Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns

“In fiction: we find the predictable boring. In real life: we find the unpredictable terrifying.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“... 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.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“I am metaphysical being, mystical and emotional, skeptical and cynical, happy and boisterous, loud and bawdy, quiet and melancholy, tender and cruel, full of mirth and despair. Inherent inconsistences mark me as part of nature, which is neither cruel nor fair, or reliable or predictable.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“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 unpredictable albeit useful light.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“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 is fun? Actually, when children play, they are often trying to reenact complex human interactions in simplified form. Human society is extremely sophisticated, much too involved for the developing brains of young children, so children run simplified simulations of adult society, playing games such as doctor, cops and robber, and school. Each game is a model that allows children to experiment with a small segment of adult behavior and then run simulations into the future. (Similarly, when adults engage in play, such as a game of poker, the brain constantly creates a model of what cards the various players possess, and then projects that model into the future, using previous data about people's personality, ability to bluff, etc. The key to games like chess, cards, and gambling is the ability to simulate the future. Animals, which live largely in the present, are not as good at games as humans are, especially if they involve planning. Infant mammals do engage in a form of play, but this is more for exercise, testing one another, practicing future battles, and establishing the coming social pecking order rather than simulating the future.)”
― Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind

“It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“The world is not made up of separate parts operating in isolation. This reductionist view of an understandable, controlled, and predictable world is flawed. And so, the strings, wires, and controls used to manage this illusionary discrete world are obsolete.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume I - Reframing and Navigating Disruption

“Economy is not baseball, where the game is always played by the same rules.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't

“It doesn't pay to get into a serious battle over every acorn, but it also doesn't pay to back down over every acorn. It's important to be predictable to a certain extent, but it's also important not to be too predictable.”
― Daniel Quinn, My Ishmael

“The moon: in that luminous face one can behold those tired phases that bring only disappointment and no satisfaction; the impulses governing its expression remain patternistic, its cycles of transition easily predictable. With moderated temperament it commands the capricious sea: its diametric opponent, in whose helpless defiance, arises an empty, albeit elegant promise, an ever-changing flicker of reflected light, a simultaneous opening and closing of paths to be traversed, a vacillating hope and disillusionment in whose unsettling direction emerges something one might wish to call, even under the hardened visage of sky, a marginal sense of freedom. To walk upon the decks of ramshackle vessels rising and descending in patterns indeterminate, to lean in ecstasy over their shaky rails to witness the splendor of that which transforms immediately upon being witnessed and which transforms thereby the witness in question: it was these flights of reverie that appealed better to one’s imagination than the lean pragmatism of predictable transition.”
― Ashim Shanker, Inward and Toward

“In a world of the ordinary and predictable, be a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“Frequent action increases predictability.”
― Cristina Imre

“Don’t carve your perception of me in stone otherwise you risk being left behind in my evolutionary journey.”
― Lebo Grand

“That was what life was: you worked, sometimes you couldn't sleep, and your future was already being shaped. Until something crashed into it and knocked everything out of true.”
― Mick Herron, Joe Country

“For what if it were easier to love a pattern when you were a pattern yourself? When social life required that you fall into its established patterns, starting with the basic division of day and night?

What if it were much harder to love what is irregular, interruptive, scattered, and uncontained?”
― Kate Briggs, The Long Form

“The reason why I work on staying sensually awake is because I often find myself irked by the tiresome predictability of modern relationships.”
― Lebo Grand

“Predictability is the essence of leadership. Unpredictable behaviour can impact the expectations on a leader.”
― Krishna Saagar Rao

“God is not boxed with, nor is He boxed in: And ironic it is, how even what a culture may consider to be 'young and fly', to Him, might've already become 'safe and predictable'.”
― Criss Jami

“branches propagate like Habits on a tree.”
― Monaristw

“The future is unpredictable, making it even more important to be prepared for it.”
― Sukant Ratnakar, Quantraz

“The only lover I know who behaves sensibly is the one who is always in touch with their sensuality; he/she takes my measurements anew each time they see me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.”
― Lebo Grand

“Your sensual growth scares people who’s sense of security depends on your stagnation and predictability.”
― Lebo Grand

“The most predictable thing about Long Covid is its unpredictability.”
― Lucy Gahan, Breaking Free from Long Covid: Reclaiming Life and the Things That Matter

“Brian: "it wouldn't be called gambling if it was predictable”
Kevin: “Practically everything is “predictable” Standard concept of ‘predictability’ just means it is easy to predict”
― Ryan Gelpke, 2017: Our Summer of Reunions: Braai Seasons with Howl Gang (Howl Gang Legend)

“Yet we humans abhor randomness and usually prefer predictability, even a false sense of it.”
― Ryan Gelpke, 2017: Our Summer of Reunions: Braai Seasons with Howl Gang (Howl Gang Legend)

“The past does not dictate the future...but it can draw a very detailed sketch.”
― Aegelis, Sophizo

“[M]eaning is part of an object to the extent that it acts upon intelligence in a predictable way.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“Some folks are predictably unpredictable.”
― Frank Sonnenberg, BECOME: Unleash the Power of Moral Character and Be Proud of the Life You Choose