Chance And Fortune Quotes & Sayings

Further, the constitution of our consciousness is the ever present and lasting element in all we do or suffer; our individuality is persistently at work, more or less, at every moment of our life: all other influences are temporal, incidental, fleeting, and subject to every kind of chance and change. This is why Aristotle says: It is not wealth but character that lasts.
And just for the same reason we can more easily bear a misfortune which comes to us entirely from without, than one which we have drawn upon ourselves; for fortune may always change, but not character. Therefore, subjective blessings - a noble nature, a capable head, a joyful temperament, bright spirits, a well-constituted, perfectly sound physique, in a word, mens sana in corpore sano, are the first and most important elements in happiness; so that we should be more intent on promoting and preserving such qualities than on the possession of external wealth and external honor. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependant upon it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure; and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard. You may die before you turn the next page. — John Fowles

I want a president with a record of public service, someone whose life's work shows our children that we don't chase fame and fortune for ourselves: we fight to give everyone a chance to succeed. — Michelle Obama

All the greatest blessings are a source of anxiety, and at no time should fortune be less trusted than when it is best; to maintain prosperity there is need of other prosperity, and in behalf of the prayers that have turned out well we must make still other prayers. For everything that comes to us from chance is unstable, and the higher it rises, the more liable it is to fall. Moreover, what is doomed to perish brings pleasure to no one; very wretched, therefore, and not merely short, must the life of those be who work hard to gain what they must work harder to keep. By great toil they attain what they wish, and with anxiety hold what they have attained; meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return. — Seneca.

No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune. — Plutarch

How much in this world is charged to chance or fortune, or veiled under a more devout name, and accorded to Providence; while, when we come to look honestly into affairs, we find it to be a debt of our own accumulation, and one which we must inevitably pay. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

All of us collect fortunes when we are children. A fortune of colors, of lights, and darkness, of movement, of tensions. Some of us have the fantastic chance to go back to his fortune when grown up. — Ingmar Bergman

He thinks of the all steps that gathered this party and marvels at the weaverless looms of fortune. — David Mitchell

You must avoid giving hostages to fortune, like getting an expensive wife, an expensive house, and a style of living that never lets you aford the time to take the chance to write what you wish. — Irwin Shaw

Compare King William with the philosopher Haeckel. The king is one of the anointed by the most high, as they claim - one upon whose head has been poured the divine petroleum of authority. Compare this king with Haeckel, who towers an intellectual colossus above the crowned mediocrity. Compare George Eliot with Queen Victoria. The Queen is clothed in garments given her by blind fortune and unreasoning chance, while George Eliot wears robes of glory woven in the loom of her own genius.
The world is beginning to pay homage to intellect, to genius, to heart.
We have advanced. We have reaped the benefit of every sublime and heroic self-sacrifice, of every divine and brave act; and we should endeavor to hand the torch to the next generation, having added a little to the intensity and glory of the flame. — Robert G. Ingersoll

One lapse of judgment can cost and talent isn't everything. A huge slice of good fortune in needed to make it to the top, and without that element of luck, you've no chance. — John Barrow

To think that we might easily have gone through life not knowing each other, missing all this free flow of love and ideas and warmth and sharing ... We share really almost everything. (Avis DeVoto to Julia Child) — Joan Reardon

Fortune can, for her pleasure, fools advance,
And toss them on the wheels of Chance. — Juvenal

I mean that the book had better make life better better in at least six or seven definite ways immediately. Also, there had better be somewhere in it a method for handling fortune and chance so as to best provoke the most complicated, involved, and glorious refractions of what's possible. — Jesse Ball

It belongs to small-mindedness to be unable to bear either honor or dishonor, either good fortune or bad, but to be filled with conceit when honored and puffed up by trifling good fortune, and to be unable to bear even the smallest dishonor and to deem any chance failure a great misfortune, and to be distressed and annonyed at everything. Moreover the small-minded man is the sort of person to call all slights an insult and dishonor, even those that are due to ignorance or forgetfulness. Small-mindedness is accompanied by pettiness, querulousness, pessimism and self-abasement. — Aristotle.

Be ready when your chance comes never fall back fight for your loved ones. — Nadair Desmar

Me! And here in the wild I have you: two halflings, and a host of men at my call, and the Ring of Rings. A pretty stroke of fortune! A chance for Faramir, Captain of Gondor, to show his quality! — J.R.R. Tolkien

One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and holds fast to the days, as to fortune or fame. — Daniel M. Gilbert

Those who wander in the world avowedly and purposely in pursuit of happiness, who view every scene of present joy with an eye to what may succeed, certainly are more liable to disappointment, misfortune and unhappiness, than those who give up their fate to chance and take the goods and evils of fortune as they come, without making happiness their study, or misery their foresight. — Fanny Burney

What is it which makes a man and a woman know that they, of all other men and women in the world, belong to each other? Is it no more than chance and meeting? no more than being alive together in the world at the same time? Is it only a curve of the throat, a line of the chin, the way the eyes are set, a way of speaking? Or is it something deeper and stranger, something beyond meeting, something beyond chance and fortune? Are there others, in other times of the world, whom we should have loved, who would have loved us? Is there, perhaps, one soul among all others
among all who have lived, the endless generations, from world's end to world's end
who must love us or die? And whom we must love, in turn
whom we must seek all our lives long
headlong and homesick
until the end? — Robert Nathan

There are two good reasons for being nice to the underdogs in this life. One, because if the underdog grows up to be the kind of person that starts shooting, you'll have a chance at survival. Two, because it's the right thing to do the third reason being that the wheel of fortune is always spinning, spinning. And just because you're at the top today doesn't mean it'll always be so. When you're at the bottom, you'll want someone to be there for you too. — Lauren Baratz-Logsted

In boxing, where most of the guys are from lower-class backgrounds and have darker skin than most of the fans, one might fear that the athletes are being exploited. But that narrative doesn't hold up very well in the world of MMA, where 99 percent of fighters are amateurs who will never earn a dime. They aren't seeking fame and fortune. For the most part, these guys are fighting because they want to and because it gives them an opportunity to strive for something big in their lives. It gives them a chance to become their best selves. — Jonathan Gottschall

Alice must already have known, even back then, when she first saw Fortune, when she was, what, nine or ten, that she would try and hitch a lift on the wheel, too, as soon as she possibly could. She must already have been thinking out how. But she couldn't have guessed how soon her chance would come. — Vanora Bennett

God has had His chance to free me, and for reasons known to Him alone, He has pinned me to ill fortune, and although I have struggled, I am run through and through with disaster; I am knifed to the hilt with fate. — Hannah Kent

Don't listen to anybody. Nobody knows the magic bullet. If they did, they'd sell it and make a fortune. Follow your gut. Follow your instincts. Every once in a while, take a chance. — Michael Cudlitz

He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance separated from him by an abyss. The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion of several distinct species that cannot communicate. Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice. — Simone Weil

Yet, when these facts are seen side by side with other facts in the case, it is difficult not to become lost in superstitious awe. Their very absurdity seems to prohibit the use of the words 'chance' and 'coincidence.' For the sceptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman Law, it is administered with sub-human inefficiency. — Eric Ambler

We acquire the love of people who, being in our proximity, are presumed to know us; and we receive reputation or celebrity, from such as are not personally acquainted with us. Merit secures to us the regard of our honest neighbors, and good fortune that of the public. Esteem is the harvest of a whole life spent in usefulness; but reputation is often bestowed upon a chance action, and depends most on success. — George Augustus Henry Sala

Obviously this stuff takes a bit of planning, but I've always been someone that sets achievable short-term goals. I've never been someone that's had a five-year plan, or a three-year plan. That just seems to lead to a lot of disappointment, and doesn't give you the chance to be flexible. So I've just always been someone that's sort of reassessed where I'm at, and set goals that are realistic. And luckily, I've had plenty of chances to recalibrate and adjust, and good fortune's come my way. — Eric Bana

A prince may be seen happy today and ruined tomorrow without having shown any chance in his character. For the prince who relies entirely on fortune is lost when it changes ... — Neil Jordan

Fear of death, wonder at the causes of chance events or unintelligible happenings, hope for divine aid and gratitude for good fortune, cooperated to generate religious belief. — Will Durant

Phaedra keeps saying she's being selfish. That she hates herself for it, but she does it anyway. She can't deny herself what she wants, even if it brings about her downfall and his." "And have you learned anything from our literary parallel?" "Not really, I keep thinking that she would do it all over again if there were a chance ... a chance that it could go right. Even if 99 times out of a 100 the story ends badly, it's worth it if only once she gets a happy ending. — Cora Carmack

If I had not try and taken chances, I would have miss many opportunities in life. — Lailah Gifty Akita

In 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, Grant, aged thirty-nine, with four children at home and scarcely a penny in the bank, had made no mark on the world and looked unlikely to do so, for all the boom conditions of mid-century America. His Plymouth Rock ancestry, his specialist education, his military rank, which together must have ensured him a sheltered corner in the life of the Old World, counted for nothing in the New. He lacked the essential quality to be what Jacques Barzun has called a "booster," one of those bustling, bonhomous, penny-counting, chance-grabbing optimists who, whether in the frenetic commercial activity of the Atlantic coast, in the emergent industries of New England and Pennsylvania or on the westward-moving frontier, were to make America's fortune. Grant, in his introspective and undemonstrative style, was a gentleman, and was crippled by the quality. — John Keegan

What is the likelihood, of winning the lottery, then lose it all the next day when you step out your front door and get struck by lightning? Probably, very slim, but then anything is possible. — Anthony Liccione

Chance or accident is not responsible for the things that happen to you, nor is predestined fate the author of your fortune or misfortune. Your subconscious impressions determine the conditions of your world. The subconscious is not selective; it is impersonal and no respecter of persons. The subconscious is not concerned with the truth or falsity of your feeling. It always accepts as true that which you feel to be true. Feeling is the assent of the subconscious to the truth of that which is declared to be true. Because of this quality of the subconscious there is nothing impossible to man. Whatever the mind of man can conceive and feel as true, the subconscious can and must objectify. Your feelings create the pattern from which your world is fashioned, and a change of feeling is a change of pattern. — Neville Goddard

Virtually unable to attract new capital to the foundering enterprise, the company seized the next year on a novel approach to raising money to fund the embryonic British Empire: a lottery.
With the reluctant approval of King James and the Church of England, the Virginia Company sold lottery tickets to the public, discovering no shortage of gamers willing to hazard hard coinage for the chance to win the 01,000 grand prize, a fortune at a time when the typical working-class family scraped by on little more than a pound a month. Having begun as a corporation, Virginia had evolved into a gamblers' stake with a lively populist following back in England. — Bob Deans

Has God decreed all things that come to pass? Then there is nothing that falls out by chance, nor are we to ascribe what we meet with either to good or ill luck and fortune. There are many events in the world which men look upon as mere accidents, yet all these come by the counsel and appointment of Heaven. — Thomas Boston

Man is at the mercy of events. Life is a perpetual succession of events, and we must submit to it. We never know from what quarter the sudden blow of chance will come. Catastrophe and good fortune come upon us and then depart, like unexpected visitors. They have their own laws, their own orbits, their own gravitational force, all independent of man. — Victor Hugo

Events don't always obey rules of time and space. Sometimes the mere thought of a certain friend will cause her to telephone after months of no communication. Or perhaps a man wonders whether he should leave his wife and in the next instant he turns on the radio and hears a notice for apartments. No coincidence is a chance. Synchronicity is the external manifestation of reality. — Jill Alexander Essbaum

Life's a wheel of fortune and it's my chance to spin it. — Tupac Shakur

We live in this irreparably broken world, and I don't wish to deny reality, but the amazing thing to me is not that we refuse to relinquish hope as a species. The amazing thing is that we're right to hold on to hope. The world may be broken, but hope is not crazy ... Obviously not all stories end happily. We don't always have good fortune, but hope gives us, as a species and as individuals, what we otherwise wouldn't have: A chance. — John Green

If you don't have the good fortune to work a lot then you take any job you get offered, whether it's a good job, fun job, a bad job, horrible job, whatever, you just take what you need to take. But I'm lucky in that - at the moment anyway and hopefully forever, but who knows - I get the chance to pick jobs for the kick of it and the fun. — James McAvoy

Some things the legislator must find ready to his hand in a state, others he must provide. And therefore we can only say: May our state be constituted in such a manner as to be blessed with the goods of which fortune disposes (for we acknowledge her power): whereas virtue and goodness in the state are not a matter of chance but the result of knowledge and purpose. A city can be virtuous only when the citizens who have a share in the government are virtuous, and in our state all the citizens share in the government; — Aristotle.

Every body should be given the chance and the necessary support to unearth their full potential. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Ages of prolonged uncertainty, while they are compatible with the highest degree of saintliness in a few, are inimical to the prosaic every-day virtues of respectable citizens. There seems no use in thrift, when tomorrow all your savings may be dissipated; no advantage in honesty, when the man towards whom you practise it is pretty sure to swindle you; no point in steadfast adherence to the cause, when no cause is important or has a chance of stable victory; no argument in favour of truthfulness, when only supple tergiversation makes the preservation of life and fortune possible. The man whose virtue has no source except a purely terrestrial prudence will in such a world, become an adventurer if he has the courage, and, if not, will seek obscurity as a timid time-server. — Bertrand Russell

It was at this time that backgammon was invented and began to be popular. It is a kind of paradigm of how wealth is acquired, which in this world is not the reward of intelligence or ability, just as luck is not a product of skill ... If luck favours the player, he gets what he wants; if it doesn't, a skilled and prudent man cannot win that which fortune only bestows on whom it likes. It is thus that the good things of this world are apportioned by chance. — Mas'udi

Just remember, without discipline, a clear strategy, and a concise plan, the speculator will fall into all the emotional pitfalls of the market - jump from one stock to another, hold a losing position too long, and cut out of a winner too soon, for no reason other than fear of losing profit. Greed, Fear, Impatience, Ignorance, and Hope will all fight for mental dominance over the speculator. Then, after a few failures and catastrophes the speculator may become demoralised, depressed, despondent, and abandon the market and the chance to make a fortune from what the market has to offer. — Jesse Lauriston Livermore

Perhaps as he was lying awake then, his life may have passed before him
his early hopeful struggles, his manly successes and prosperity, his downfall in his declining years, and his present helpless condition
no chance of revenge against Fortune, which had had the better of him
neither name nor money to bequeath
a spent-out, bootless life of defeat and disappointment, and the end here! Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, To-morrow, success or failure won't matter much, and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil. — William Makepeace Thackeray

Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'. — Siri Hustvedt

Someone responding to intuition, to chance and fortune, often can't explain himself well. — Alec Wilkinson

O how feeble is man's power,
That if good fortune fall,
Cannot add another hour,
Nor a lost hour recall!
But come bad chance,
And we join to'it our strength,
And we teach it art and length,
Itself o'er us to'advance. — John Donne

I wanted, I think, to acknowledge Luck: the chance of it, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others; made especially savage for children because they may not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it. — Paul Newman

Money is often a matter of chance or good fortune and is not the mark of a successful life. It is not the thing that brings a throb of pleasure or a thrill into my life. And I would not pose as a successful man if that were to be the measure. — Charles M. Schwab

You think you're paying your dollar for a chance at the $6.2 million jackpot on Saturday, but really you're paying for the pleasure of the car ride home, deciding which credit card to pay off first and where your kid will suddenly be able to go to college. — Kelly Braffet

The oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life. Indeed, his chance to live at all is slim, and if he should survive the arrows of his own outrageous fortune and in the two weeks of his carefree youth find a clean smooth place to fix on, the years afterwards are full of stress, passion, and danger. — M.F.K. Fisher

Most men gamble with [Fortune], and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the chancellors of God. In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of fear from her rotations. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles.
They are skilled at creating their own chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good. — Richard Wiseman

Wisdom and fortune combating together,
If that the former dare but what it can,
No chance may shake it. — William Shakespeare

Your NOT FALLING APART, i tell my self. IF ONLY YOU KNEW, its HARDER TO BREATH with out you. THE AIR I BREATH is not the same with out you. I dont want to LOVE SOMEBODY else. MAKES ME WONDER if i could ever tell you, but I'm OUT OF GOODBYES. I don't want to lose you. This is MISERY, I CANT LIE, i am LOSING MY MIND over you. NOTHING LAST FOREVER, but THIS LOVE dose. Its a TANGLED mystery. ONE MORE NIGHT goes bye with no reply. The FORTUNE TELLER said you would never be mine. I end up BACK AT YOUR DOOR, when THE SUN comes back to life. This is are LAST CHANCE, RUNAWAY with me tonight. And lets never say goodbye. — Rhyan Roads

Baji-naji, nand' paidhi. Fortune has a human face and bastard Chance whores drunken down your streets. — C.J. Cherryh