Pattern Recognition Quotes

“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can't face the terror that it might all be random.”
― Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls

“Thus Milton refines the question down to a matter of faith," said Coleridge, bringing the lecture to a close, "and a kind of faith more independent, autonomous - more truly strong, as a matter of fact - than the Puritans really sought. Faith, he tells us, is not an exotic bloom to be laboriously maintained by the exclusion of most aspects of the day to day world, nor a useful delusion to be supported by sophistries and half-truths like a child's belief in Father Christmas - not, in short, a prudently unregarded adherence to a constructed creed; but rather must be, if anything, a clear-eyed recognition of the patterns and tendencies, to be found in every piece of the world's fabric, which are the lineaments of God. This is why religion can only be advice and clarification, and cannot carry any spurs of enforcement - for only belief and behavior that is independently arrived at, and then chosen, can be praised or blamed. This being the case, it can be seen as a criminal abridgement of a person's rights willfully to keep him in ignorance of any facts - no piece can be judged inadmissible, for the more stones, both bright and dark, that are added to the mosaic, the clearer is our picture of God.”
― Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates

“The movie Koyaanisqatsi shows non-commented time-lapse footage and focuses our attention on the very rhythm of our civilized modern life and nature. A marijuana high can do something for a user similar to what this time-lapse footage does. The enhancement of episodic memory and the acceleration of associative streams of memories can alter and enhance our recognition of patterns in our lives in various ways. If we are presented with quick associative chains of past experiences, we can see a pattern in a body of information that is usually not at once presented to our “inner eye” as such.”
― Sebastian Marincolo

“A marijuana high can enhance core human mental abilities. It can help you to focus, to remember, to see new patterns, to imagine, to be creative, to introspect, to empathically understand others, and to come to deep insights. If you don’t find this amazing you have lost your sense of wonder. Which, by the way, is something a high can bring back, too.”
― Sebastian Marincolo

“I’m not much of a chess player, but there is an aspect of the game that I find fascinating. After a while, you can almost see lines of force between the pieces. Areas of danger where it is physically impossible to move pieces into. Clouds of possibility, forbidden zones.”
― Hannu Rajaniemi, The Fractal Prince

“Be quiet, darling. Let pattern recognition have its way.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“The pattern recognition theory of mind that I articulate in this book is based on a different fundamental unit: not the neuron itself, but rather an assembly of neurons, which I estimate to number around a hundred. The wiring and synaptic strengths within each unit are relatively stable and determined genetically—that is the organization within each pattern recognition module is determined by genetic design. Learning takes place in the creation of connections between these units, not within them, and probably in the synaptic strengths of the interunit connections.”
― Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

“Ignorance and its denial will, sad to say, lead us down the same road as it did in all past history.”
― Jordan Maxwell, Symbols, Sex, and the Stars in Popular Beliefs

“True wisdom is acquired by the person who sees patterns, and comes to understand those patterns in their connection to other patterns - and from these interconnected patterns, learns the code of life - and from the learning of the code of life, becomes a co-creator with God.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic

“Thinking about the journey I have been on and why I might be here in this lifetime. I’m here to not repeat patterns. To not live on other people’s terms, but on my own terms. To stop trying to please everyone at the expense of myself. So here I am, to find me, and then I freak out. What? Did I upset you? It’s fucking scary. Fucking scary to take a baby step in that direction. To reveal myself? To not look in the mirror or take an iPhone selfie that will expose the inside? But this is what it takes to be my best. In this lifetime, to bare my naked soul and my scarred skin. You can love me or hate me. Or be somewhere in between. But I am who I am. We all have many scars from just living. From living life, feeling love, hurt, loss, pain. Maybe instead of hiding those scars this time I can turn them into beautiful tattoos of experience on that naked skin.”
― Riitta Klint

“Events seem to be ordered into an ominous logic.”
― Thomas Pynchon, V.

“You need to be so careful when there is one simple diagnosis that instantly pops into your mind that beautifully explains everything all at once. That's when you need to stop and check your thinking...Beware of the delirious guy in the emergency unit with the long history of alcoholism, because you will say, 'He's just drunk,' and you'll miss the subdural hematoma.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“Action is one, two is a coincidence, three of them forms a trend and suggests a pattern.”
― Thomas Vato

“Certainty is fleeting, but through experimentation, systems innovation and trial-and-error, instructive patterns emerge as guidance.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“The inadequacy of unidimensional plotting along a continuum (in this case the diagonal of a symmetric matrix) inevitably would make "buffer" elements appear non-conformist when in fact they may be part of an interconnected pattern.”
― Jennifer K. McArthur, Place-Names in the Knossos Tablets Identification and Location

“But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.”
― Michael Shermer

“Stories people told themselves were biased by the availability of the material used to construct them...what people remember about the past, [Kahneman and Tversky] suggested, is likely to warp their judgement of the future. "We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“I don't like the word 'instinct', because it just sounds like a gut thing. I think what we call instinct is really a type of pattern recognition, which comes from experience looking at the companies and industries and situations that work.”
― Daniel Loeb

“A founder isn't blinded by the conventional wisdom of the present, they've recognised the patterns of the past and see the clues to the future, now”
― Henry Joseph-Grant

“The ultimate goal of this book is to share what I consider to be life-saving and life-changing lessons that I was fortunate enough to learn as a key participant in many of recent history’s most impactful events. The single most important lesson I learned, and the plain but powerful foundation that supports the entire book, is that the most effective weapon on any battlefield—whether it be combat, business, or life—is our mind’s ability to recognize life’s underlying patterns.

Patterns of thinking, patterns of nature, and patterns of history are just a few of the infinite examples of life’s underlying patterns that inform the behavior of the complex world that swirls around us. Patterns reveal how the real world works. When recognized, they allow us to understand, adapt, and master the future as it unfolds in front of us.”
― Pete Blaber, The Mission, the Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander