Chance
Quotations about chance.
Quotes
- Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. In its carelessness it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.
- Elizabeth Bowen, The Little Girls (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), p. 276.
- Your will cannot always choose the path; very often the route is determined by chance or by the will of others.
- Fausto Cercignani in: Brian Morris, Simply Transcribed. Quotations from Fausto Cercignani, 2013 p. 11.
- Nothing in this world happens by chance.
- Paulo Coelho, Veronica Decides to Die (1998).
- I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
- Le hasard, c'est peut-être le pseudonyme de Dieu quand il ne veut pas signer.
- Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.
- Théophile Gautier, La croix de Berny (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1855), p. 28.
- People fail to appreciate how many chances they have to experience something coincidental.
- Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 0-02-911706-2 (1991), p. 176
- Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.- William Ernest Henley (1849-1903), Invictus.
- The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance...This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance.
- William James, The Dilemma of Determinism, (1884), p.153.
- In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.
- Louis Pasteur, in a lecture, University of Lille (7 December 1854); reported in Houston Peterson, A Treasury of the World's Great Speeches (1954), p. 473.
- Variant translation: Chance favors the prepared mind.
- Most coincidences are simply chance events that turn out to be far more probable than many people imagine.
- Ivars Peterson, The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997) ISBN 0-471-16449-6, p. 188
- Randomness, chaos, uncertainty, and chance are all a part of our lives. They reside at the ill-defined boundaries between what we know, what we can know, and what is beyond our knowing. They make life interesting.
- Ivars Peterson, The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997) ISBN 0-471-16449-6, p. 202
- Times go by turns, and chances change by course,
From foul to fair, from better hap to worse.- Robert Southwell (1561-1595), Times go by Turns.
- Chance is a funny thing and it is easily mistaken for portent.
- Chris Stedman, Faitheist (2012), Chapter 5
- Yet its essence was the certitude that his life was not totally at the mercy of chance. Somehow, it was more important than that. This sense of power inside his head — which he could intensify by pulling a face and wrinkling up the muscles of his forehead — aroused a glow of optimism, an expectation of exciting events. He knew that for him, fate held something special in store.
- Colin Wilson in Spider World: The Desert, p. 26 (1987)
Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations
- Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 92-93.
- How slight a chance may raise or sink a soul!
- Philip James Bailey, Festus (1839), A Country Town.
- Perhaps it may turn out a sang,
Perhaps turn out a sermon.- Robert Burns, Epistle to a Young Friend.
- Le hasard c'est peut-être le pseudonyme de Dieu, quand il ne veut pas signer.
- Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when He did not want to sign.
- Anatole France, Le Jardin d'Epicure (1894), p. 132. Quoted "Le hasard, en definitive, c'est Dieu".
- I shot an arrow into the air
It fell to earth I knew not where;
For so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Arrow and the Song.
- Next him high arbiter
Chance governs all.- John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book II, line 909.
- Or that power
Which erring men call chance.- John Milton, Comus (1637), line 587.
- Chance is blind and is the sole author of creation.
- X. B. Saintine, Piccola, Chapter III.
- Ours is no sapling, chance-sown by the fountain,
Blooming at Beltane, in winter to fade.- Walter Scott, Hail to the Chief, Lady of the Lake (1810), Canto II. Quoted by Senator Vest in nominating Bland in Chicago.
- Chance will not do the work—Chance sends the breeze;
But if the pilot slumber at the helm,
The very wind that wafts us towards the port
May dash us on the shelves.—The steersman's part is vigilance,
Blow it or rough or smooth.- Walter Scott, Fortunes of Nigel, Chapter XXII.
- I shall show the cinders of my spirits
Through the ashes of my chance.- William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1600s), Act V, scene 2, line 173.
- Against ill chances men are ever merry;
But heaviness foreruns the good event.- William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II (c. 1597-99), Act IV, scene 2, line 82.
- But as the unthought-on accident is guilty
To what we wildly do, so we profess
Ourselves to be the slaves of chance, and flies
Of every wind that blows.- William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale (c. 1610-11), Act IV, scene 4, line 549.
- Your worthiness is the result of chance.
- Quam sæpe forte temere eveniunt, quæ non audeas optare!
- How often things occur by mere chance, which we dared not even to hope for.
- Terence, Phormio, V. 1. 31.
- A lucky chance, that oft decides the fate
Of mighty monarchs.- James Thomson, The Seasons, Summer (1727), line 1,285.
- Er spricht Unsinn; für den Vernünftigen
Menschen giebt es gar keinen Zufall.- He talks nonsense; to a sensible man there is no such thing as chance.
- Ludwig Tieck, Fortunat.
- Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.
- Voltaire, A Philosophical Dictionary.
