Leonard Mlodinow Quotes

Doesn't assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?

Noble acts and momentous events happen in the same way and produce the same impression as the ordinary facts.

The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent; thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking.

Hunter S. Thompson brings a lunatic genius to ordinary events, and I bring an ordinary sensibility to lunatic events.

Skill is a function of chance. It’s an intuitive best-use of chance situations.

You know, it actually can happen. I mean, the chances of it happening are very rare, but it can happen actually. Which is crazy. Not that it—the chances of it are, like, you know, it's like probably ‘pigs could fly.' Like, I don't think pigs could fly, but actually sharks could be stuck in tornados. There could be a sharknado.

Reversion to the mean is the iron rule of the financial markets.

Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time.

The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially, the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer.

Every event, or appearance, or accident, which seems to deviate from the ordinary course of nature has been rashly ascribed to the immediate action of the Deity.

There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again.

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.

Having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.

Well, if there's an infinite amount of chances for something to happen, then eventually it will happen - no matter how small the likelihood.

You don't find geniuses in street musicians, but that doesn't mean to say you can't be really good.

Every day is ordinary, until it isn't.

Fundamental modes of speech, the bulk of the vocabulary, are formed in the ordinary intercourse of life, carried on not as a set means of instruction but as a social necessity.

If there's 10,000 people looking at the stocks and trying to pick winners, one in 10,000 is going to score, by chance alone, a great coup, and that's all that's going on. It's a game, it's a chance operation, and people think they are doing something purposeful... but they're really not.

The word 'mundane' has come to mean 'boring' and 'dull', and it really shouldn't - it should mean the opposite. Because it comes from the latin mundus, meaning 'the world'. And the world is anything but dull: The world is wonderful. There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

Profit margins are probably the most mean-reverting series in finance, and if profit margins do not mean-revert, then something has gone badly wrong with capitalism. If high profits do not attract competition, there is something wrong with the system and it is not functioning properly.

Mere chance ... alone would never account for so habitual and large an amount of difference as that between varieties of the same species.

I have been luckier than the law of averages should allow. I could never be so lucky again.

At all events, I do not mean to leave it unaltered.

Just because something is invisible doesn't mean it isn't there. At any given time, there are a host of invisibles floating among us. There are clairvoyants to see ghosts; but who sees the invisible emotions, the unrecorded events? Who is that sees love, more evanescent than any ghost, let alone can catch it? Who are you tell me that I don't know what love is?

Impetuosity and audacity often achieve what ordinary means fail to achieve.