"The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle." (Hannah Arendt, "The Human Condition", 1958)
"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it." (Hannah Arendt, "Men in Dark Times", 1968)
"Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves and where it finds its evidence." (Hannah Arendt, "On Violence", 1970)
"It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think." (Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind", 1977)
"It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances." (Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind", 1977)
"Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it." (Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind", 1977)
"The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth." (Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind", 1977)
"To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know." (Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind", 1977)
"What science and the quest for knowledge are after is irrefutable truth; that is, propositions that human beings are not free to reject — that are compelling. They are of two kinds, as we have known since Leibnitz: truths of reasoning and truths of fact." (Hannah Arendt, The New Yorker, 1977)
"Analogies, metaphors, and emblems are the threads by which the mind holds on to the world even when, absentmindedly, it has lost direct contact with it, and they guarantee the unity of human experience. Moreover, in the thinking process itself they serve as models to give us our bearings lest we stagger blindly among experiences that our bodily senses with their relative certainty of knowledge cannot guide us through." (Hannah Arendt, "The Life of the Mind", 1981)
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