Theo Epstein Quotes

I see mysteries and complications wherever I look, and I have never met a steadily logical person.

Most of the time-- 99 percent of the time-- you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.

Everything happens for a reason, but that doesn't mean there's a point.

You never know why something works or doesn't.

You learn that not all things fall into a certain kind of pattern that can be predictable and that can be understandable and that's going to be easy, you know.

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.

Adult life is dealing with an enormous amount of questions that don't have answers. So I let the mystery settle into my music. I don't deny anything, I don't advocate anything, I just live with it.

After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

I think it's an interesting thing to me, because we have this desire for everything to be explained to us. But if you go through your daily actions, very little ends up having a written-down explanation for why things happen, or why people do specific things.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

By the way, the point between rationality and what we would call the irrational is a very difficult point to establish. There's no specific line, as you know.

The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.

It's hard to find logic in things sometimes. That's why I can't analyze things too much, because it often doesn't make much sense.

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.

I'm of the opinion that life doesn't always tie up neatly at the end of the episode.

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

It is such a complex matter we live within, it is impossible to track logic and decision making really, so therefore each choice can actually only be seen as coincidence.

It is always the unreadable that occurs.

The human mind cannot grasp the causes of phenomena in the aggregate. But the need to find these causes is inherent in man’s soul. And the human intellect, without investigating the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions of phenomena, any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, snatches at the first, the most intelligible approximation to a cause, and says: This is the cause!

Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

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.

In conlusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time.

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.