Chanced Quotes & Sayings

I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess (Bendis, the Thracian Artemis.); and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant Polemarchus the son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his servant to run and bid us wait for him. The servant took hold of me by the cloak behind, and said: Polemarchus desires you to wait. — Plato

I chanced upon these words from a letter by Van Gogh: Like everyone else, I feel the need of family and friendship, affection and friendly intercourse. I am not made of iron, like a hydrant or a lamp post.
Perhaps this is what really counts: to arrive at the core of human feeling, in spite of the evidence. — Paul Auster

He turned left, therefore, in the hope of finding better fortune in that direction, but after a while lost his nerve and turned a speculative right, and then chanced another exploratory left, and after a few more such maneuvers was thoroughly lost. — Douglas Adams

...[She] was not nearly so intrusive. If she happened to observe the comings and goings of her friends out of the corner of her eye (which she could hardly fail to do, given the nature of her favorite sitting-place) and chanced to be able to remember when she had seen them and where they had been going, it was simply a tribute to her keen powers of observation and recall. Conscious spying was beneath her altogether. — Tom Holt

Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours. A man once spent his entire life searching for a particular shade of blue that he remembered encountering in childhood. He began to despair of ever finding it, thinking he must have imagined that precise shade, that it could not possibly exist in nature. Then one day he chanced upon it. It was the colour of a beetle in a museum of natural history. He wept for joy.'

- "Zima Blue" by Alastair Reynolds — Alastair Reynolds

Man is man because he chanced to develop intelligence instead of instinct; otherwise he would to this day have remained among the anthropoid apes. He has turned away from nature, become unnatural, as it were, disliked the earth upon which he found himself, and changed the face of it somewhat to his liking. — Jack London

But the artist began to have misgivings as the wall underwent its transformation. Bigger than any pavement project he had yet undertaken, it made him restless. Over the years, a precise cycle had entered the rhythm of his life, the cycle of arrival, creation, and obliteration. Like sleeping, waking and stretching, or eating, digesting and excreting, the cycle sang in harmony with the blood in his veins and the breath in his lungs. He learned to disdain the overlong sojourn and the procrastinated departure, for they were the progenitors of complacent routine, to be shunned at all costs. The journey
chanced, unplanned, solitary
was the thing to relish.
Now, however, his old way of life was being threatened. The agreeable neighborhood and the solidity of the long, black wall were reawakening in him the usual sources of human sorrow: a yearning for permanence, for roots, for something he could call his own ... — Rohinton Mistry

And that which is often said of the volume and power of the human voice was then apparent to the eye. For ravens which chanced to be flying overhead fell down into the stadium. The cause of this was the rupture of the air; for when the voice is borne aloft loud and strong, the air is rent asunder by it and will not support flying creatures, but lets them fall, as if they were over a vacuum, unless, indeed, they are transfixed by a sort of blow, as of a weapon, and fall down dead. It is possible, too, that in such cases there is a whirling motion of the air, which becomes like a waterspout at sea with a refluent flow of the surges caused by their very volume. — Plutarch

Every epoch which seeks renewal first projects its ideal into a human form. In order to comprehend its own essence tangibly, the spirit of the time chooses a human being as its prototype and raising this single individual, often one upon whom it has chanced to come, far beyond his measure, the spirit enthuses itself for its own enthusiasm. — Stefan Zweig

This was a high that could never be duplicated. It was a high more dangerous to a man's soul than any found in a drug. Because this high chanced an addiction to not just the pleasure, but to the woman. And he was beginning to fear he had found the woman and the pleasure that could become an addiction impossible to live without. — Lora Leigh

That night marks my life's dark center, the moment when growing up ended and the long downward slope toward death began. The wonder to me now is that I thought myself worth saving ... I reached out and clung for life with my good left hand like a claw, grasping at moving legs to raise myself from the dirt. Desperate to save myself in a river of people saving themselves. And if they chanced to look down and see me struggling underneath them, they saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious. That is what it means to be a beast in the kingdom. — Barbara Kingsolver

You need not think that because we chanced to be born of the same parents, I shall suffer you to fasten me down by even the feeblest claim: I can tell you this - if the whole human race, ourselves excepted, were swept away, and we two stood alone on the earth, I would leave you in the old world, and betake myself to new. — Charlotte Bronte

No one is fit to encounter an adversary's case successfully unless he can make it for a moment his own, unless he can put it more forcibly than the adversary could put it for himself, and take account not only of what the adversary says, but also the best he MIGHT say, if only he had chanced to think it. — William Hurrell Mallock

Emma's heart was pounding. She chanced a look up at Julian. For the briefest of moments he looked like someone who'd been staggering through the Mojave Desert, half-dead from the sun, and had seen a glimmer of water up ahead only to have it turn out to be a mirage. "Still no Mark?" Emma said hastily as Cristina reached them. Not that there was a real reason Cristina would know where Mark was; Emma just didn't want her looking at Julian. Not when he looked like that. — Cassandra Clare

I once sheepishly asked a prominent Evangelical apologist, with his PhD in New Testament, if he had ever chanced to read Strauss's Life of Jesus Critically Examined. He had not. Things began to become clear to me. He didn't know that all his trusty arguments had been thoroughly refuted many decades before he was born. — Robert M. Price

Hey, Megan?"
She peeked one lid open. "Hmm?"
"Can we have ice cream for breakfast?"
Her mouth curved into a grin. She couldn't think of anyone, save maybe Kate, who could draw a smile from her so quickly. But he was just unexpectedly adorable. "Maybe. If you're a good boy." She cringed. Why the hell did she say that? Was she ... flirting with him? Restraining a grimace, she chanced a look at him.
His dark gaze shifted from playful to scorching. "And what would that entail?"
Heat shot through her body, and unfamiliar desire pooled in her belly. Flustered, she kicked off the top cover. "Not asking questions like that, to start. Now go back to sleep. It's too damn early to be awake."
She heaved a deep breath to calm her racing heart .
"if you say so." Even with his eyes closed, a smile continued to play around his lips. — Laura Kaye

Just where she had paused, the brook chanced to form a pool so smooth and quiet that it reflected a perfect image of her little figure, with all the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of flowers and wreathed foliage ... It was strange, the way in which Pearl stood, looking so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the forest gloom, herself, meanwhile, all glorified with a ray of sunshine ... — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Kumiko and I felt something for each other from the beginning. It was not one of those strong, impulsive feelings that can hit two people like an electric shock when they first meet, but something quieter and gentler, like two tiny lights traveling in tandem through a vast darkness and drawing imperceptibly closer to each other as they go. As our meetings grew more frequent, I felt not so much that I had met someone new as that I had chanced upon a dear old friend. — Haruki Murakami

He chanced a glance at her. She was not tearful; that was one of the many wonderful things about Ginny, she was rarely weepy. He had sometimes thought that having six brothers must have toughened her up. — J.K. Rowling

Now he had chanced on one of he standard hard-on sessions of the shower, as on both sides of him and across the room three queens sported horizontal members which they turned around from time to time to conceal or display, barely exchanging looks as they resolved. The old men took no interest in this activity, knowing perhaps from long experience that it rarely meant anything or led anywhere, was a brief and helpless surrender to the forcing-house of the shower. In a few seconds the hard-on might pass from one end of the room to the other with the foolish perfection of a Busby Berkeley routine. — Alan Hollinghurst

It marked a turning point for me. It marked the point where I recognized that I must never - not even when he was 'well' again - expect from Didi what one normally expects from a friend. When he gave anything to other people - as he often did, as he had done earlier to me and was to do again - it was by the happy accident of their chancing to appreciate what he chanced to be 'giving off'. If he happened to be in a mood to charm, to find things amusing, to respond lovingly, to use his intuition (which could be sharp) on people's behaviour, to apply his intelligence, then whoever was around would benefit; but he was so hermetically walled up in himself that he was unablee to discover inother people any constant reason to attend to them, still less to be considerate of them, and he couldn't answer their demands. — Diana Athill

I am Mrs. Poulteney. I have come to take up residence. Kindly inform your Master."
"His Infinitude has been informed of your decease, ma'am. His angels have already sung a Jubilate in celebration of the event."
"That is most proper and kind of Him." And the worthy lady, pluming and swelling, made to sweep into the imposing white hall she saw beyond the butler's head. But the man did not move aside. Instead, he rather impertinently jangled some keys he chanced to have in his hand.
"My man! Make way. I am she. Mrs. Poulteney of Lyme Regis."
"Formerly of Lyme Regis, ma'am. And now of a much more tropical abode."
With that, the brutal flunkey slammed the door in her face. — John Fowles

Everywhere, in whatever realm of life, whether among its callous, coarsely impoverished and messily moldering lower ranks, or among its monotonously gelid and tediously tidy upper strata, everywhere, if but once, a person will encounter a phenomenon on his journey that is unlike anything he has chanced to see heretofore and that, at least once will awake in him a feeling unlike any he is fated to feel for the rest of his life. — Nikolai Gogol

It was perhaps fortunate that I chanced to see Rebecca in her so-different modes -- so damaged and incorrigible in the one, so full of promise and potential in the other -- and that she was on of the first patients I saw in our clinic. For what I saw in her, what she showed me, I now saw in all. — Oliver Sacks

At the Ball

I chanced to see you. Music played,
Vain chatter filled the place.
It seemed as though a veil were laid
Across your secret face.

Your eyes alone were sad; your way
Of speaking ravished me,
As though I heard a far pipe play,
And on the shores the sea.

How welcome was your look of thought,
Your figure tall and slight;
And that clear laugh with sadness fraught
Is in my heart to-night.

And when the noise of day is stilled
Once more they come to me,
Those eyes with so much sadness filled,
That voice, with gaiety.

Down to the depths of sleep I go,
Where dreams uncaptured move.
But do I love you? Who can know?
Yet this, I think, is love. — Alexei Tolstoy

I'll lay a bet," said Sancho, "that before long there won't be a tavern, roadside inn, hostelry, or barber's shop where the story of our doings won't be painted up; but I'd like it painted by the hand of a better painter than painted these." "Thou art right, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "for this painter is like Orbaneja, a painter there was at Ubeda, who when they asked him what he was painting, used to say, 'Whatever it may turn out'; and if he chanced to paint a cock he would write under it, 'This is a cock,' for fear they might think it was a fox." - Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote — Michael Gruber

We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form. — Arthur Machen

Throughout their friendship Deronda had been used to Hans' egotism, but he had never before felt intolerant of it: when Hans, habitually pouring out his own feelings and affairs, had never cared for any detail in return, and, if he chanced to know any, had soon forgotten it — George Eliot

After a couple seconds his eyelids fluttered at the scent that was wafting off Detective Michaels. Damn 'em all to hell. He smelled like something he wanted to rut against and come hard on. Fuck. Judge rolled his window down all the way. He'd rather smell the trash on the street than get a hard-on for this good-smelling, eager-to-prove-himself, straight asshole. He chanced a look at Michaels and was shocked to see him slouched and confident riding with him. He had a dark pair of aviator shades on, staring out the window with one hand propped on the door. It was almost as if he didn't know he was hot. And damnit if that wasn't sexy in itself. — A.E. Via

How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature. — Thomas B. Macaulay

One brain's blueprint may promote joy more readily than most; in another, pessimism reigns. Whether happiness infuses or eludes a person depends, in part, on the DNA he has chanced to receive. (152) — Thomas Lewis

Every one's true worship was that which he found in use in the place where he chanced to be. — Michel De Montaigne

The other day I chanced to meet
An angry man upon the street -
A man of wrath, a man of war,
A man who truculently bore
Over his shoulder, like a lance,
A banner labeled "Tolerance. — Phyllis McGinley

[A]dventures befall the unadventuresome as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result
and have been since at least the time of Odysseus
of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventure happens in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. — Michael Chabon

Even the most misfitting child
Who's chanced upon the library's worth,
Sits with the genius of the Earth
And turns the key to the whole world.
Hear It Again — Ted Hughes

Their bodies lay flatly on the rocks, and their eyes regarded him with evil interest: but it does not appear that Mr. Fison was afraid, or that he realized that he was in any danger. Possibly his confidence is to be ascribed to the limpness of their attitudes. But he was horrified, of course, and intensely excited and indignant at such revolting creatures preying upon human flesh. He thought they had chanced upon a drowned body. He shouted to them, with the idea of driving them off, and, finding they did not budge, cast about him, picked up a big rounded lump of rock, and flung it at one.
And then, slowly uncoiling their tentacles, they all began moving towards him - creeping at first deliberately, and making a soft purring sound to each other. — H.G.Wells

The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned at the stake, suggested new modes of tortures to their tormentors. Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer; and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, did not care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all they did. — Henry David Thoreau

He chanced a look at her and saw the flare of something in her eyes. A salve to the emptiness that sometimes threatened to suffocate him. — Melina Marchetta

[A]dventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result - and have been since at least the time of Odysseus - of the fatal act of leaving one's home, or trying to return to it again. All adventures happen in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one's home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had: then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret. — Michael Chabon

I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature, and yet a single sentence may express all that I have done. I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg,-this is all. It chanced to be a result that was found to apply to other groups and has led to other conclusions of a like nature. — Louis Agassiz

I chanced a shy look at Sam, and found he was already staring at me. When our eyes met, we both blushed but didn't look away. His curiosity, his energy, his wonder for the world had reawakened the part of me I was so sure I'd lost.
"What now?" he asked.
I smiled. "Next stop the pyramids?"
He grinned, and impulsively I lifted my chin and kissed him. For a moment, the warmth of that kiss drove away the pain and the horrors of the last few days. I leaned into him as much as my bandages allowed, until at last I pulled my lips away and rested my forehead against his.
"The pyramids, the North Pole, the moon," Sam replied, his voice a bit hoarse. "Next stop anywhere, as long as you're there. — Jessica Khoury

Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result - when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared. Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; whereas soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom. Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, — Plato

The wonder to me now is that I thought my life worth saving ... Desperate to save myself in a river of people saving themselves. And if they chanced to look down and see me struggling underneath them, they saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious. — Barbara Kingsolver

But I must object to your dooming Colonel Brandon and his wife to the constant confinement of a sick chamber, merely because he chanced to complain yesterday (a very cold damp day) of a slight rheumatic feel in one of his shoulders."
"But he talked of flannel waistcoats," said Marianne; "and with me a flannel waistcoat is invariably connected with the aches, cramps, rheumatisms, and every species of ailment that can afflict the old and the feeble. — Jane Austen

People ask me how it happens that my children are all so promptly obedient and so happy. As if it chanced that some parents have such children or chanced that some have not! I am afraid it is only too true, as someone has remarked, that "this is the age of obedient parents!" What then will be the future of their children? How can they yield to God who have never been taught to yield to human authority? And how well fitted will they be to rule their own households who have never learned to rule themselves? — Elizabeth Payson Prentiss

There would therefore have been all the more delight at the birth of the first son William within less than a year of Margaret's death, tinged with more than a little anxiety, in view of the fateful words hic incepit pestis, 'here began plague', in the burial part of the register three months later. Just how close this dread flea-borne disease was to the Shakespeares can be guaged from the fact that their Henley Street neighbour Roger Green lost four of his children and town clerk Richard Symons three. One estimate suggests that the town lost around two hundred, or about fifteen per cent, of its population during this single outbreak. It is a sobering thought how much the world could have lost at this time by one ill-chanced flea-bite. — Ian Wilson

Noa Noah shook his head and grinned. "He no savvee me Tahitian," he explained. "He savvee me wear pants all the same white man." "You'll have to give him a course in 'Sartor Resartus,'" Sheldon laughed, as he came down and began to make friends with Satan. It chanced just then that Adamu Adam and Matauare, two of Joan's — Jack London

You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house
, and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,
you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening ... — Rainer Maria Rilke

In some strange way, any new fact or insight that I may have found has not seemed to me as a "discovery" of mine, but rather something that had always been there and that I had chanced to pick up. — Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar

Everywhere in life, no matter where it may run its course, whether amid its harsh, raspingly poor, and squalidly mildewing lowly ranks, or amid its monotonously frigid and depressingly tidy upper classes - everywhere, if it be but once, man is fated to meet a phenomenon that is unlike all that which he may have chanced to meet hitherto; which, if but once, will awaken within him an emotion that is unlike all those which he is fated to experience all life long. Everywhere, running counter to all the sorrows of which our life is woven, a glittering joy will gaily flash by, as, at times, a glittering equipage with gold on its gear, with its picturesque horses, and sparkling because of its gleaming plate glass will suddenly, unexpectedly, speed by some backwoods poverty-stricken hamlet that had never beheld anything but a country cart, — Nikolai Gogol

Never is a historic deed already completed when it is done but always only when it is handed down to posterity. What we call "history" by no means represents the sum total of all significant deeds ... World historyonly comprises that tiny lighted sector which chanced to be placed in the spotlight by poetic or scholarly depictions. — Stefan Zweig

Laura, illustrious through her own virtues, and long famed through my verses, first appeared to my eyes in my youth, in the year of our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April, in the church of St. Clare in Avignon, at matins; and in the same city, also on the sixth day of April, at the same first hour, but in the year 1348, the light of her life was withdrawn from the light of day, while I, as it chanced, was in Verona, unaware of my fate ... — Francesco Petrarca

Tori chanced a glance out of the corner of her eye to the man at her side. His attention appeared riveted to the road in front of them. Good. He probably didn't even notice. His head suddenly swiveled her way as if he sensed her gaze. He winked at her. Winked! "I gotta say your stamina is impressive." His voice held a warm, teasing lilt. "I didn't think you'd make it past Mrs. Cooper's chicken farm with that iron-poker spine, and here you lasted three times as long." Tori stiffened, then realized the irony of the action and settled for pursing her lips instead. "I'm sure I have no idea what you are talking about." Mr. Porter chuckled. "And here I'd always thought you the honest type." Tori — Karen Witemeyer

I chanced the chest and the slow-beating heart. The quick compulsion of my will was rewarded. I no longer had chest nor heart. I was only a mind, a soul, a consciousness - call it what you will - incorporate in a nebulous brain that, while it still centered inside my skull, was expanded, and was continuing to expand, beyond my skull. — Jack London

Anyone who has chanced like me to roam through desolate mountains and studied at length their fantastic shapes and drunk the invigorating air of their valleys can understand why I wish to describe and depict these magic scenes for others. — Mikhail Lermontov

Young men, in the conduct and manage of actions, embrace more than they can hold; stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end, without consideration of the means and degrees; pursue some few principles, which they have chanced upon absurdly; care not to innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences; use extreme remedies at first; and, that which doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them; like an unready horse, that will neither stop nor turn. — Francis Bacon

How do you know if the next act you are about to do is the right one or the wrong one? Consider the face of the poorest and most vulnerable human being that you have ever chanced upon, and ask yourself if the act that you contemplate will be of benefit to that person; and if it will be, it's the right thing to do, and if not, rethink it. — Mahatma Gandhi

It is as if the Caru'ee were able to perceive an echo of the past, and unconsciously, as they built upon a palimpsest of books written long ago and long forgotten, chanced to stumble upon an essence of meaning that could not be lost, no matter how much time had passed. — Ken Liu

He chanced to be in a lucid critical mood, and would not sympathize with exaltation. — E. M. Forster

They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid-ocean, and see every detail of each others' faces, and hear whatever they chanced to say. — Virginia Woolf