Murphy's Miscellaneous Laws
Everything you need to know about Murphy's Miscellaneous Laws and why it fails. A curated list of 215 observations.
Laws in this category
Wiio's laws: Communication usually fails, except by accident.
Streisand effect: Attempts to suppress information often lead to greater publicity
Niven's law: If time travel is possible, no time machine will be invented.
Horstman's Corollary to Parkinson's Law: Work contracts to fit in the time we give it.
- Mark Horstman
- Isaac Asimov
- Stock-Sanford
Sealed Can Corollary: Heat a sealed container and the pressure rises until something gives.
Boyle's Corollary: Shrink the space, and the pressure goes up.
- Émile Clapeyron
Redshift Corollary: What moves away from you looks redder and more disappointing.
No Center Corollary: Wherever you stand, everything seems to be running away from you.
Hubble-Lemaître Law: The farther away a galaxy is, the faster it moves away from us (v = H₀ × d).
- Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble
Conversion Corollary: Energy is never lost, only turned into a form you can't use.
Free Lunch Corollary: You can't get more energy out than you put in.
- Mayer, Joule, and Helmholtz, formalized by Clausius
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More laws in this category
- A man walking through the turnstiles backwards, going to Bangkok
- Never look up when dragonflies fly overhead
- Everybody wants to use the bathroom at the same time
- The squeakiness of floorboards is directly proportional to the need to remain unnoticed
- You might forget your past, but your past will never forget you
- Given a controversial, immoral issue, enough leeway in mainstream society, it will become the norm
- All generalizations are false, including this
- You need something the most, only after you realize you've permanently lost it
- Spending enough time and money can explain all human behavior psychologically
- Everything gets worse with time except wine. And even that, not always
- The early bird suffers from insomnia
- History is like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace, and revolution continue forever
- Everything that is countable is too little
- Your nose always itches when your hands are tied
- When you believe you have seen the utmost of one's stupidity, they never cease to amaze you and go one...
- Life stinks, then you have a heart attack, get paraplegic, and find yourself forced to say that it wasn't...
- JKash's law
- You cannot stop the ongoing love affair between pasta sauce and a white dress shirt
- Your parents' advice only makes sense 20 years after they gave it to you
- Your cell phone always falls on the hardest part of the ground
- Friends come and go. Enemies gather
- Kent's Law
- What is history? The last kick of the victor in the pants of the defeated
- If you have a 50% chance of being right, you're wrong 90% of the time
- Anything by Nothing Equals Everything (Any number divided by zero equals infinite)
- Whenever you don't want to do something, it is exactly when it needs to be done
- The weakest link is the most stable one
- The surest way to be late is to have plenty of time
- After trying to get something apart (or together) for 90 minutes, you find a clip that completes the job...
- Clothes that are labeled (non-run) aren't
- The height of foolishness is to believe red or black die doesn't run
- The more certain you are that your thought is original, the more obscure the source from which you...
- Too often, we lose sight of life's simple pleasures. Remember, when someone annoys you, it takes 42...
- Nothing succeeds like success
- Behind every successful man is a woman. The further behind the woman, the better the chances of his success
- Junk is something you've kept for years and throw away two weeks before you need it
- The Inverse Law of Ninja
- The item you need the most will always be at the bottom of the pack
- Whenever you get a great, original idea, it's when you forget the idea
- Any good idea you ever had will just be attributed to someone else once you tell someone about it
- If you hold a hammer, everything around you will look like a nail
- If you try to be better than worse, you'll be better at being worse
- Nothing is definite
- The grass is always greener on the other side
- Why violence when there is vengeance
- In stores, the other line always moves faster
- Clicking your heels three times means you've fallen and can't get up
- Binil's law of greed
- Life is a sexually transmitted disease with a 100% fatality rate
- Things can't get worse if you were born an Amazon pygmy cannibal
- Moral beliefs tend to be like laws in crowded places
- If there's a flat surface, someone will put something on it
- Don't leapfrog with a unicorn
- A non-smoker among smokers will always be upwind
- A Camel is a Horse made by a committee
- A committee is the only life form with 12 stomachs and no brains
- The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights
- A person's happiness is inversely related to the number of timepieces they own
- If you have a clear mind, you don't get to think
- To be a successful person, you must succeed
- A person who writes a law has never experienced it before
- Given the current workload, the light at the end of the tunnel has been cut
- It is better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you're a fool than to open it and remove all...
- A heavy frozen roast, stored on a freezer shelf, 5 feet from the ground, will fall on the most vulnerable...
- The Voice of Experience never says until it's too late
- If you are not thoroughly confused, you have not been thoroughly informed
- When sitting in the audience watching a sports event among 60,000 other spectators, you pick your nose...
- If you fiddle with something long enough, you'll eventually break it
- Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will kill you
- Man is the only animal able to retrace his steps to make the mistakes previously avoided
- The greater the number of people involved in a social function, the less intelligent each participant becomes
- A plea for justice is often a claim for injustice in one's favor
- When dinner is on time, your spouse is late
- Once you light up, the commercial starts
- Sailor's Law
- Murphy's Fundamental Principle
- The more you say you'll win, the more difficult it is to come true
- Even the darkest hour has only 60 minutes
- Exception rule
- To clean up is to make a mess
- Whenever a phone rings, it rings at least in pairs
- If 50 people say something foolish, it is still silly
- Never teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the Pig
- A winner should quit; a quitter is sure to win
- Skepticism is to pessimism as doubt is to proof
- Skeptics are blessed with ignorance, while pessimists are cursed with knowledge
- Having is not always as pleasing as wanting. It is not logical, but I have observed it to be true. Spock...
- When you remember the trash needs taking out, the garbage truck is two doors down
- Sooner or later, you will spill your beer
- Never open a pill bottle over the bathroom sink
- The most precise measuring instrument known to man for finding the center underneath a parked vehicle is a...
- Anything that can go wrong will happen one hour before you are supposed to leave on vacation
- Anything that can go wrong will, one hour before the three-day weekend starts
- Anything that can go wrong will, an hour before closing on Friday
- No system is so perfect that it can't be made to work
- During any endeavor, you will always see the winning move right after you've executed the losing one
- The less you have to paint, the more paint you get
- When you're riding a bike, it will rain. Lube something good, and it only gets better. Lube something bad...
- To check the spelling of a word in the dictionary, you have to know how it's written
- Pens sent through the dryer intentionally never break, but those
- Nobody is incompetent. Incompetence is just incompetence
- Coincidence does not exist; everything happens for a random reason
- Dato's Law
- Anything that can be misused will be misused (legal loopholes, marketing information, etc.)
- Law of Complexity
- The time you have to wait before bed increases proportionally to how tired you are
- Assaf's Law of Advice
- If you're happy, don’t worry, you’ll get over it
- If you have no problems, you have no clue what is happening
- Murphy's law will apply to you when you know you are lucky. If you know Murphy will hit you anytime, he...
- Murphy's Law is unconstitutional, but will never be repealed
- It is a fact that everything in the universe moves counterclockwise
- Opitz's law
- You'll first have to do the last thing you wished for
- The first thing to break is the irreparable
- Keys dropped near an open elevator door will always fall down the crack
- It will cost you more to get them out than to get a second set cut. Graham, an elevator technician, sent...
- The more skilled you are at something, the worse it is when showing someone
- If someone ever said that something wouldn't go wrong in a billion years, they said it a billion years ago
- The one you buy will be the only one that doesn't work
- When playing board games involving quizzes, etc., you will always know the answers to everyone else's...
- The future is like now, but it will be longer
- Zuhnic Laws of Plagiarism
- If your plane is about to crash, the parachutes are missing
- Aquarium Laws
- If your dog suffers from diarrhea, it will happen between when the carpet is cleaned for the holidays and...
- Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience
- Alder's razor (Newton's flaming laser sword)
- Betteridge's law of headlines
- Brandolini's law (Bullshit Asymmetry Principle)
- Celine's Second Law
- Chekhov's gun
- Chesterton's fence
- Shermer's last law
- Charles Rubin Law
- Cope's rule
- Crane's law
- Dollo's law
- Gause's law (competitive exclusion)
- Gell‑Mann amnesia effect
- Gerson's law
- Gibrat's law
- Gibson's law
- Ginsberg's Theorem Part 1 (consequence of zeroth law of thermodynamics)
- Ginsberg's Theorem Part 2 (consequence of first law of thermodynamics)
- Ginsberg's Theorem Part 3 (consequence of second law of thermodynamics)
- Ginsberg's Theorem Part 4 (consequence of third law of thermodynamics)
- Goodhart's law
- Hick's law
- Hickam's dictum
- Hotelling's law
- Hutber's law
- Lem's law
- Lindy's law
- Littlewood's law
- Miller's law (communication)
- Mooers's law
- Occam's razor
- Papert's principle
- Pareto principle
- Parkinson's law of triviality
- Peltzman effect
- Poe's law
- Price's law
- Reilly's law of retail gravitation
- Roemer's law
- Rosenthal effect (Pygmalion effect)
- Rothbard's law
- Say's law
- Sayre's law
- Segal's law
- Shirky principle
- Stigler's law of eponymy
- Vierordt's law
- In American religion, no matter how weird the thing you can imagine, it has already happened
- Benford's Law
- Second Digit Corollary
- Unit Conversion Corollary
- Narrow Range Corollary
- Fabrication Corollary
- Gresham's Law
- Varian Rule
- Wagner's Law (law of increasing state activity)
- Parkinson's Fourth Law
- Second Law of Thermodynamics
- Clausius Statement
- Kelvin Statement
- Local Decrease Corollary
- Ohm's Law
- Heat Corollary