Quotessence
Home / Topics / Patterns Quotes

Patterns Quotes

Browse 2075 quotes about Patterns.

Related topics

Patterns Quotes

“What discoveries I made in the course of writing stories all begin with the particular, never the general. They are mostly hindsight: arrows that I now find I myself have left behind me, which have shown me some right, or wrong, way I have come. What one story may have pointed out to me is of no avail in the writing of another. But 'avail' is not what I want; freedom ahead is what each story promises - beginning anew. And all the while, as further hindsight has told me, certain patterns in my work repeat themselves without my realizing. There would be no way of knowing this, for during the writing of any single story, there is no other existing. Each writer must find out for himself, I imagine, on what basis he lives with his own stories.”

“So [in mathematics] we get to play and imagine whatever we want and make patterns and ask questions about them. But how do we answer these questions? It’s not at all like science. There’s no experiment I can do ... The only way to get at the truth about our imaginations is to use our imaginations, and that is hard work.”

“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.”

“It's difficult to know where to begin, sir.' 'Yes, the beginning is the tricky part. But perhaps there is no beginning, perhaps we can't look that far back.' He got up from his desk and went over to the window, from where he could see thin pillar of smoke rising into the clouds. 'I never know where anything comes from, Walter.' 'Comes from, sir?' 'Where you come from, where I come from, where all this comes from.' And he gestured at the offices and homes beneath him. He was about to say something else but he stopped, embarrassed; and in any case he was coming to the limits of his understanding. He was not sure if all the movements and changes in the world were part of some coherent development, like the weaving of a quilt which remains one fabric despite its variegated pattern. Or was it a more delicate operation than this - like the enlarging surface of a balloon in the sense that, although each part increased at the same rate of growth as every other part, the entire object grew more fragile as it expanded? And if one element was suddenly to vanish, would the others disappear also - imploding upon each other helplessly as if time itself were unravelling amid a confusion of Sights, calls, shrieks and phrases of music which grew smaller and smaller? He thought of a train disappearing into the distance, until eventually only the smoke and the smell of its engine remained.”

“Forests are really just a repetition of patterns; it’s why people lose their minds in forests and also on oceans. The human brain needs disruption, I think, and that’s why we make things. You could say that an artist, for instance, finds patterns in everything but I think probably what an artist is really there to do is to tear a big hole in the maddening patterns, to create something that is so itself that it repels everything around it. I’m all for artificiality, is what I’m saying. It’s what humans bring to the table.”

“The vital roles that schema and pattern play in Archaic art can be considered symptoms of a larger Greek demand for regularity and order which extends beyond the realms of representational art into architecture, poetry, and philosophy and beyond the limits of the Archaic period itself. The language of Homer is highly ordered: its formulae were originally patterns for the ear. Hesiod's Theogony imposes patterns on gods and heroes by putting each in his genealogical place, and his Works and Days moves from a particular instance of injustice to universal truths and patterns of human activity. Archaic poetry in general is full of literary schemata or conventions, and Archaic poets express thought and meaning through the harmony of opposites. Archilochos detected a rhysmos (pattern) even in the rise and fall of human fortunes. The philosophers of Miletos attempted to fit nature to preconceived patterns and so to extract order from apparent chaos. Pythagoras (or his followers) ordered the world through number. The urge to impose kosmos (order) on the nature of things is not peculiar to the Archaic mind – in Xenophon's Oikonomikos Sokrates reports that all things, even pots and pans, look more beautiful when they are kept in order, and even the space between them looks beautiful – but is nonetheless particularly characteristic of it.”

“Some arts move in time, like music; others are presented in space, like painting. In both cases the organizing principle is recurrence, which is called rhythm when it is temporal and pattern when it is spatial. Thus we speak of the rhythm of music and the pattern of painting; but later, to show off our sophistication, we may begin to speak of the rhythm of painting and the pattern of music. In other words, all arts may be conceived both temporally and spatially. The score of a musical composition may be studied all at once; a picture may be seen as the track of an intricate dance of the eye. Literature seems to be intermediate between music and painting: its words form rhythms which approach a musical sequence of sounds at one of its boundaries and form patterns which approach the hieroglyphic or pictorial image atthe other. The attempts to get as near to these boundaries as possible form the main body of what is called experimental writing. We may call the rhythm of literature the narrative, and the pattern, the simultaneous mental grasp of the verbal structure, the meaning or significance. We hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer’s total pattern we “see” what he means.”

“What was this sense of guilt so seemingly innate, so easy to come by, to think, to feel, so verily physical? It seemed that when one felt this guilt one was but retracing in one’s living a faint pattern designed long before; it seemed that one was trying to remember a gigantic shock that had left an impression upon one’s body which one could not forget, but which had been almost forgotten by the conscious mind, creating in one a state of external anxiety.”

“I need to tell you a story.' What about? Zachariah, Zachariah, my foundling boy. 'A boy. A boxer, a fighting man. A brother. No. About brothers, sisters. Foundlings, laid-in-the-streets. Fights, fighting. A boy, it all begins with the boy. My love. A wolf. Peter and the Wolf! Oh dear! I am very crazy! Let me—I must tell you this story.' Why? 'I'm frightened.' Of? 'Fractals. Patterns.' Ah, says the fish, looking at Rachel with his wise eyes. Chaos! 'Yes,' thinks Rachel. 'Chaos. Fearful symmetry.' Go home, says the fish, flipping over, flashing in light, and diving down into the great blue sea.”

“If I love order, it's not the mark of a character subjected to an inner discipline, a repression of the instincts. In me the idea of an absolutely regular world, symmetrical and methodical, is associated with that first impulse and burgeoning of nature. The rest of your images that associate passion with disorder, love with intemperate overflow - river fire whirlpool volcano - are for me memories of nothingness and listlessness and boredom.”

“Here’s your breakfast nugget: Affirm it and receive it, only if it’s for you. Feel free to: Like, Tag and share! Deuteronomy 2:3 — “You have circled this mountain long enough. Now turn north.” You have done this thing… this sin, this cycle, this abuse, this tolerance, this disrespect, this narcissistic way so many times. When are you going to stop and turn in another direction? If you are tired of the same cycles and patterns repeat this and mean it. Say it, post it, repeat it daily until it’s real in your life. “The cycle ends with me. I am the interruption hell didn’t see coming.” “This morning, I heard the Spirit whisper: ‘You’ve seen this before, but this time you’ll respond differently. This time, you’ll walk away healed, not haunted.’ Cycles don’t end when circumstances change—they end when your response does.” Read that again!”

“If a man has been married twice and has been in several relationships that ended badly, you need to ask why before you date him. So many woman are gullible and think the reason those relationships didn't work out was because the women he was involved with were insecure. All abusers blame their breakups on the woman. Don't be so egotistical that you think you have the magical assets to keep this guy in love with you. A smart woman doesn't date a man with a long history of bad relationships. She finds out the other side of the story from the women that came before her. She recognizes there is a pattern and something is not right.”

“People are going to come into your life, and God is going to use them to help you. To them you’re insignificant and don’t matter. They are not going to understand you, or even see the point of why God had you hang in there with them for so long. Remember this: Sometimes meeting someone has nothing to do with what you can provide for him or her and everything to do with what God needs you to recognize in that person. If you didn’t understand the message, God will keep sending the same person or situation into your life.”

“People-pleasing is more than just being kind or helpful. It's a deeply ingrained habit of prioritizing others' needs to the detriment of our own.”

“While wanting to be helpful and considerate is a positive trait, people-pleasing becomes problematic when it becomes a chronic pattern that negatively impacts your well-being.”

“Basing your self-worth on external validation can lead to deep feelings of inadequacy, worthlessness, and a constant need for approval.”

“When someone is cruel, harsh, mean, to not take their words personally is one thing, but to hear the silent cry within those words is another. This sort of perspective can not only liberate us from crippling self-doubt in the face of criticism, it can also liberate us from automatically becoming blind participants in the interaction patterns that the cruel person has become accustomed to—a favour we do for the other person as much as for ourselves.”

“He placed a pinch of snow on his tongue and thought of making snow ice cream with Frank and their mother when they were small boys - 'First you stir in the vanilla' - Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together.”

“The cards don’t speak in absolutes. They speak in patterns, echoes and whispers of what we’re ready to hear - Intuitive Tarot: Reading Between the Lines.”

“How could I not go on talking to you? How could I not expect to see you when it's the end of the day? Our life together was many things, concrete, tangible things, that included bacon, potatoes, coffee and toothpaste, but it was also a pattern. We had flow, colour, texture. We were the originators and makers of the shared life that we worked on every day. Now, I have to work on it alone. What I have are memories. The past. The present is no longer a work in progress.”

“This, in the therapy world, is what we call cognitive fusion and experiential avoidance. Translation? You get so tangled up in one voice, one thought, one emotion, that it hijacks the whole inner town. You believe the thought as if it were the truth”