Top 100 Quotes About Probabilities
#1. Our beliefs are not just estimates of probabilities. They are also the instruments that guide our actions.
John Ortberg
#2. We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities.
Ariel Durant
#4. As in the piling up of hypothetical alternatives, creative accidents follow the law of probabilities the more we fish, the more likely we are to get a strike.
Alex Faickney Osborn
#5. Bayes's theorem and that looks like this: People who understand Bayes's theorem can use it to work out complex problems involving probability distributions - or inverse probabilities, as they are sometimes called.
Bill Bryson
#6. I know too well that these arguments from probabilities are imposters, and unless great caution is observed in the use of them, they are apt to be deceptive.
Plato
#7. The calculus of probabilities, when confined within just limits, ought to interest, in an equal degree, the mathematician, the experimentalist, and the statesman.
Francois Arago
#8. How much time is wasted in what is called thought, but is merely care--an anxious idling over the fancied probabilities of result
George MacDonald
#9. It is profitable wisdom to know when we have done enough: Much time and pains are spared in not flattering ourselves against probabilities.
William Penn
#10. How do people make the judgments and how do they assign decision weights? We start from two simple answers, then qualify them. Here are the oversimplified answers: People overestimate the probabilities of unlikely events. People overweight unlikely events in their decisions.
Daniel Kahneman
#11. But I'd worked in IT long enough to know: Hope is a terrible survival trait. My methods were data collection, comparisons of probabilities, and collections of "what if.
Anonymous
#12. Don't censor your dreams or vision with practicalities and probabilities.
Jack Canfield
#13. Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties.
Murray Gell-Mann
#14. When you set more goals, try more things, engage in more activities, and explore more opportunities, your probabilities of success increase dramatically.
Brian Tracy
#15. He was at a starting point which makes many a man's career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose ...
George Eliot
#16. You are completely at choice who you will be today in your interactions with others. Compassionate, kind, giving and forgiving will create one set of probabilities; angry, judgmental, critical and defensive will create another one altogether.
Marianne Williamson
#17. The moment of enlightenment is when a person's dreams of possibilities become images of probabilities.
Vic Braden
#18. One must be careful with words. Words turn probabilities into facts and by sheer force of
definition translate tendencies into habits.
Fay Weldon
#19. Unfortunately, we generally find it difficult to assess very small probabilities. We typically overestimate them (thinking the events more likely than they are) and underestimate very high probabilities.
David J. Hand
#20. Reason, said Butler, provides no complete system of knowledge, and in ordinary life it can offer us only probabilities.
Bruce L. Shelley
#21. It has been pointed out already that no knowledge of probabilities, less in degree than certainty, helps us to know what conclusions are true, and that there is no direct relation between the truth of a proposition and its probability. Probability begins and ends with probability.
John Maynard Keynes
#22. Half of the skill in magick consists of identifying probabilities worth enhancing.
Peter J. Carroll
#23. The novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities, of his culture.
Flannery O'Connor
#24. I don't wanna be in a fake-perfect-relationship. Because, however, it will eventually turn to be a shitty relationship. And why on earth, I would put myself inside a shitty and tiring relationship while there are probabilities and chances to have a real happy relationship out there?
Nina Ardianti
#25. In its efforts to learn as much as possible about nature, modern physics has found that certain things can never be "known" with certainty. Much of our knowledge must always remain uncertain. The most we can know is in terms of probabilities.
Richard P. Feynman
#26. There is no reason to regard God as immune from
consideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there is
certainly no reason to suppose that, just because God can be neither
proved nor disproved, his probability of existence is 50 per cent.
Richard Dawkins
#27. My advice to the unborn is, don't be born with a gambling instinct unless you have a good sense of probabilities.
Jack Dreyfus
#28. All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgements of probabilities, and not on certainties.
Charles William Eliot
#29. Arguments derived from probabilities are idle.
Plato
#30. I'm a pessimist about probabilities; I'm an optimist about possibilities.
Lewis Mumford
#31. Genes work with probabilities; they don't work with certainties. So most things that you're looking at with these genetic tests, it's not like you're condemned to automatically get the disease or the syndrome. There's a lot of factors in play there.
Sam Kean
#32. There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is impossible.
Jack Vance
#33. Statistics, likelihoods, and probabilities mean everything to men, nothing to God.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#34. and go over and over in his mind the manifold possibilities, probabilities and potentialities
Elsie Lincoln Benedict
#35. We make investment decisions based on our evaluation of the most profitable combination of probabilities.
Warren Buffett
#36. In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it.
Martin J. Rees
#37. Scientists are stuck in this belief that we tell people probabilities, not absolute answers.
Stephen Schneider
#38. The best practical advice then is: try to maximize your expected payoff, which is the sum of all payoffs multiplied by probabilities.
Howard Raiffa
#39. The most obvious problem with estimating a dummy dependent variable model using OLS is that the predicted probabilities aren't guaranteed
Roberto Pedace
#40. We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones.
Jeffrey Kluger
#42. The rest of the universe is like the coin. The events of
the past appear to cause the present, but every time we pop
back into existence we are subject to a new set of probabilities.
Literally anything can happen.
Scott Adams
#43. The more people you contact, the higher your sales will be because of the law of probabilities.
Brian Tracy
#44. Descartes was not interested in probabilities. He wanted absolute certainty. He had to be sure that indubitable knowledge, immune from skeptical attack, was possible.
Steven Nadler
#45. Almost all life depends on probabilities.
Voltaire
#46. Investing is not a natural science but rather a social science. So, it's never purely empirical; what you are trying to do is everything you possibly can to enhance your probabilities of being right more often than being wrong.
William Browne
#47. You never get bored ... when you have the probabilities of your next meal to speculate on, pro and con.
Samuel Hopkins Adams
#48. A stochastic process is about the results of convolving probabilities-which is just what management is about, as well.
Anthony Stafford Beer
#49. ...the absence of certainty does not mean that one interpretation is as valid as any other. Probabilities and plausibilities matter; and when the evidence is less precise or less tangible than we would like it to be, some explanations are still more likely than others.
Mary Lefkowitz
#50. The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense reduced to calculus; it enables us to appreciate with exactness that which accurate minds feel with a sort of instinct for which of times they are unable to account.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
#51. We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#52. The province of faith begins where probabilities cease and sight and sense fail.
George Muller
#53. The Law of Probabilities: the more things you try, the more likely one of them will work.
Jack Canfield
#54. The trouble, Danny suspected, was that "the understanding of numbers is so weak that they don't communicate anything. Everyone feels that those probabilities are not real - that they are just something on somebody's mind.
Michael Lewis
#55. Certainty is not biologically possible. We must learn (and teach our children) to tolerate the unpleasantness of uncertainty. Science has given us the language and tools of probabilities. We have methods for analyzing and ranking opinion according to their likelihood of correctness. That is enough.
Robert A. Burton
#56. The balance of probabilities, therefore, comes out strongly against the existence of a god.
J. L. Mackie
#57. Our necessary ignorance of so much means that we have to deal largely with probabilities and chances
Friedrich A. Hayek
#58. In this world, what is here is not necessarily here, and what is now may not really be now: place and time are malleable, and everything is seen through a haze of probabilities, rather than with certainty.
Amir Aczel
#59. Leadership both projects to the future and reflects upon the past. It bursts with possibilities, flaunts peculiarities, and occasionally defies probabilities.
Marcia Whicker
#60. Walking on a path of uncertainties,
Shuffling on the probabilities of uncertainties,
Waging on the possibilities of uncertainties,
Waiting for the occurrences of uncertainties,
Solving the mysteries of wandering uncertainties,
We move, lead and live.
Pushpa Rana
#61. A man must study general conditions, to seize them so as to be able to anticipate probabilities.
Jesse Lauriston Livermore
#62. Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities
that theory to which the most glorious objects of human research are indebted for the most glorious of illustration.
Edgar Allan Poe
#63. Why couldn't she have this, just enjoy this, without creating obstacles, digging up problems, worrying about mistakes, about tomorrow's? Why let the maybe's, the what if's, the probabilities spoil something so lovely?
Nora Roberts
#64. Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any programme our fear has sketched out. Fear is almost always haunted by terrible dramatic scenes, which recur in spite of the best-argued probabilities against them.
George Eliot
#65. REASON, v.i. To weight probabilities in the scales of desire.
Ambrose Bierce
#66. History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.
Alan Greenspan
#67. Although we deal with probabilities and expectations, the actual results can deviate substantially from such expectations, particularly on a short-term basis.
Warren Buffett
#68. We cannot live on probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it is nothing.
James Anthony Froude
#69. You want something, you dwell upon it consciously for a while, you consciously imagine it coming to the forefront of probabilities, closer to your actuality. Then you drop it like a pebble into Framework 2, forget about it as much as possible for a fortnight, and do this in a certain rhythm.
Seth
#70. The theory of probabilities is basically only common sense reduced to a calculus. It makes one estimate accurately what right-minded people feel by a sort of instinct, often without being able to give a reason for it.
Pierre-Simon Laplace
#71. Probabilities - the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.
George Eliot
#72. Was he happy? One would ask that question in vain. A question like this makes sense only when applied to creatures who are rich in alternative possibilities, so that the actual truth can be contrasted with partly real probabilities and reflect itself in them.
Bruno Schulz
#73. The true and the approximately true are apprehended by the same faculty; it may also be noted that men have a sufficient natural instinct for what is true, and usually do arrive at the truth. Hence the man who makes a good guess at truth is likely to make a good guess at probabilities.
Aristotle.
#75. Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic
Michael Shermer
#76. If the universe was scientific and just left to itself, then we'd have statistical probabilities to rely on. But once people are involved it sometimes becomes much more problematic because they're erratic. People do crazy things that don't make sense.
Sara Sheridan
#77. It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.
Arthur Stanley Eddington
#78. Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, then we are usually stymied or reduced to speculation about probabilities. For many roads lead to almost any Rome.
Stephen Jay Gould
#79. The paranormal world is a much more desired realm. There's no limit to possibilities, no comparison to probabilities, no concept of actualities. There's no solid platform for racism, judgment or hierarchy. It is exactly the manifestation you choose it to be, darkness and death included.
Rachel A. Olson
#80. I have stressed this distinction because it is an important one. It defines the fundamental difference between probability and statistics: the former concerns predictions based on fixed probabilities; the latter concerns the inference of those probabilities based on observed data.
Leonard Mlodinow
#81. We don't deal in absolutes. We deal in probabilities.
Seth Klarman
#82. The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.
Isaac Asimov
#83. Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process.
Clay Shirky
#84. I was told, and indeed I saw several examples, that neither time nor place was much minded, and that I might hazard being equally careless of chronology and geography; but I piqued myself on having studied Aristotle, and scrupulously attended to the probabilities of time and place.
Charlotte Turner Smith
#85. People play the lottery all the time unaware of how mind-bogglingly difficult it is to win. It seems like they take a different approach to probabilities. Their rationale must be, Well, I can either win it or not win it, so my odds of winning are 50/50.
Orlando Winters
#86. As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.
Charles Darwin
#87. He who sees different ways to the same end, will, unless he watches carefully over his own conduct, lay out too much of his attention upon the comparison of probabilities and the adjustment of expedients, and pause in the choice of his road, till some accident intercepts his journey.
Samuel Johnson
#88. I don't simply create probabilities, I guide them.
Lionel Suggs
#90. The true power is in the imagination which dares to speculate upon that which is not yet. The imagination, backed by great expectations, can bring about almost any reality within the range of probabilities.
Seth
#91. I don't care about probabilities. If something were one-in-a-million, I would wonder if the one had found me. It's the uncertainty that's torture.
Jackie Lea Sommers
#92. Contrary to the popular notion that only creationism relies on the supernatural, evolutionism must as well, since the probabilities of random formation of life are so tiny as to require a 'miracle' for spontaneous generation tantamount to a theological argument.
Chandra Wickramasinghe
#93. First, the only certainty is that there is no certainty. Second, every decision as a consequence is a matter of weighing probabilities. Third, despite uncertainty we must decide and we must act. And lastly we need to judge decisions not only on the results, but how those decisions were made.
Robert Rubin
#94. He who has heard the same thing told by 12,000 eye-witnesses has only 12,000 probabilities, which are equal to one strong probability, which is far from certain.
Voltaire
#95. Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.
George Eliot
#96. Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.
George Eliot
#97. Adam went to bed comforted, having woven for himself an ingenious web of probabilities - the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth. His
George Eliot
#98. Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.
James Anthony Froude
#99. The art of drawing conclusions from experiments and observations consists in evaluating probabilities and in estimating whether they are sufficiently great or numerous enough to constitute proofs. This kind of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than it is commonly thought to be ...
Antoine Lavoisier
#100. wherefore one who divines well in regard to the truth will also be able to divine well in regard to probabilities. It
Aristotle.
