Donald Knuth Quotes

Nature is very constant and conformable with herself.

No one welcomes chaos, but why crave stability and predictability?

I like to have a regimen. I don't like to be fancy free.

I'm a big routine guy. I have to have everything in threes.

It's all about consistency, and what makes a child or a dog secure: order, clarity - all those things.

I like routine.

There is no course of life so weak and sotish as that which is managed by order, method, and discipline.

I like it when things are where they're supposed to be.

I believe in routine.

I am not really superstitious - I get ready in the same order pretty much every day. I'm afraid I'm a bit boring like that.

I'm someone who likes routine.

Everything in nature goes by law, and not by luck.

He who studies it [Nature] has continually the exquisite pleasure of discerning or half discerning and divining laws; regularities glimmer through an appearance of confusion; analogies between phenomena of a different order suggest themselves and set the imagination in motion; the mind is haunted with the sense of a vast unity not yet discoverable or nameable.

Regularity in Nature is not proof of the control of Nature by a Divine intelligence; it is rather the reverse. If something- call it matter, or ether, or x - exists, it must operate in accordance with its innate qualities; and so long as this x remains uncontrolled, its manifestations will continue unchallenged- in other words, there will be order. The same causes, the same results. That is the manifest signs of a natural order that knows nothing of God.

Nothing in the many processes of Nature, whether she deals with men or with things, comes by chance or accident or is really at the mercy of external causes.

The human understanding of its own nature is prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.

What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It's a sure thing! It's a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.

You believe in a God who plays dice, I in complete law and order.

Yesternight the sun went hence, And yet is here today.

In fact, if you are faced with the prospect of running across an open field in which lightning bolts are going to be a problem, you are much better off if their timing and location are determined by something, since then they may be predictable by you, and hence avoidable. Determinism is the friend, not the foe, of those who dislike inevitability.

If you love the truth, you'll trust it - that is, you will expect it to be good, beautiful, perfect, orderly, etc., in the long run, not necessarily in the short run.

Nature will not let us stay in any one place for too long. She will let us stay just long enough to gather the experience necessary to the unfolding and advancement of the soul. This is a wise provision, for should we stay there too long, we would become too set, too rigid, too inflexible. Nature demands change in order that we may advance.

Thou mayest foresee... the things which will be. For they will certainly be of like form, and it is not possible that they should deviate from the order of things now: accordingly to have contemplated human life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for ten thousand years.

In the long run, failure was the only thing that worked predictably. All else was accidental.

Routine is the god of every social system; it is the seventh heaven of business, the essential component in the success of every factory, the ideal of every statesman. The social machine should run like clockwork.