Quotes & Sayings About Lottery

I think competition in any kind of activity like music, art, literature - anything that's not done with a timer - is actually impossible. So, in effect, what you're doing is you're entering the lottery. You're hoping that you play well (and that) you play your best on the day that you're heard, and you're hoping that the people who are judging will like what you do. — Emanuel Ax

A lottery is a tax on stupidity. — Ambrose Bierce

It is 23.32 p.m. I still believe in symmetry, so this will be the last part. You've reached an end if you come back to where you started. I also remain superstitious about certain numbers. I use 23 and 32 for my lottery tickets, for example. It extends to dates. I still see signs. — Olivia Sudjic

Please don't waste-away in front of a TV waiting to win a lottery during the precious few hours you are not imprisoned in corporate shackles. — Bryant McGill

You've won the evolutionary lottery: You're a vampire. Let's go to Disneyland! — J.R. Ward

Intimacy with a beloved pet or special animal makes millions of people feel as though they win the lottery every day. — Marty Becker

There are, it is true, at present no great prizes in literature such as are offered by the learned professions, but there are quite as many small ones - competences; while, on the other hand, it is not so much of a lottery. — James Payn

Who doubting tyranny, and fainting under Fortune's false lottery, desperately run To death, for dread of death; that soul's most stout, That, bearing all mischance, dares last it out. — Francis Beaumont

Writing is all a lottery
I have been a loser by the works of the greatest men of the age. — Tobias Smollett

The good news is that going blind is not going to make you as unhappy as you think it will. The bad news is that winning the lottery will not make you as happy as you expect. — Daniel Gilbert

So long as we refuse to include lottery tickets among the symphonies, or medical bulletins among the overtures, we must refrain from treating the emotions as an aesthetic monopoly of music in general or a certain piece of music in particular. — Eduard Hanslick

You know you are capitalism's ideal puppet (and that education betrayed you) when winning the lottery is your only chance to realizing financial freedom. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It is a bad business, dealing in lottery tickets ... Riches got in such a hasty manner never wear well. — Sarah Josepha Hale

The trouble with conspiracies, even those that are to everybody's advantage in the long run, is that they are open to abuse. If manipulators really had the powers claimed, they could win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science — Richard Dawkins

Finding someone you can really connect with is like winning the lottery
It happens basically never, but if it does, you really shouldn't blow it. — Jessica Verdi

Once the country was settled and built, the bosses changed the order from a stack of educated workers to a barrel of minimum wage lottery dreamers. — Lenny Bruce

I'm the world's worst after-dinner speaker. I need pictures to respond to. I was the voice of the lottery balls once and got the sack. — Sid Waddell

You don't necessarily have to go to film school to be a brilliant film maker. If you are a good listener and you study life, and you find that story that is buried within each and every one of us, and you figure out a way to bring that out. And sometimes it doesn't necessarily mean money or winning the lottery. — Tony Todd

Reality was a drunk buying a lottery ticket, cashing out to the tune of seventy million dollars, and splitting it with his favorite barmaid. A little girl emerging alive from a well in Texas where she'd been trapped for six days. A college boy falling from a fifth-floor in Cancun and only breaking his wrist. Reality was Ralph. — Stephen King

Two best friends traveled from the Burdekin in North Queensland sometime in the 1960s and walked into the Union and fell in love with Grace. Tom finch was the smarter talker of the two and won first round, marrying her before his name came up in the lottery sending him to Vietnam on a tour of duty. He never returned. The heartbroken, patient one, Bill Mackee, grieved a best friend and married the love of his life, adopting the twins when they were four years old. — Melina Marchetta

It's truly interesting to observe how genetics works in families, and what a huge lottery it is to inherit some of our relatives' appearance features. — Sahara Sanders

Being born's a hell of a lottery. — David Mitchell

Knock on wood, but I think we hit the gestational carrier lottery! — Giuliana Rancic

Life is a lottery that we've already won. But most people have not cashed in their tickets. — Louise Hay

Lottery was just a tax on people who weren't good at math. — Cindi Madsen

My father had drawn number 3,004 in a death lottery in which German precision trumped Nazi brutality. — Leonard Mlodinow

I guess I think of lotteries as a tax on the mathematically challenged. — Roger Jones

Like every poor person, I used to dream about winning the lottery. I didn't just get money, though. I got fame. And I got fame before I got money, and it was scary. — Amber Rose

We won the lottery in life and life is such a beautiful, precious gift, and we have to savor it, because as far as we know, we are the only living things in the universe, so it is our duty to protect it. — Francesca Martinez

The world is filled with unfortunate souls who didn't hear opportunity knock at the door, because they were down at the convenience stor buying lottery tickets. — Napoleon Hill

I won the family lottery. I come from the best family in the world. — Jake Epstein

I've been really lucky to get on shows that stay on. It's one thing to book a show, and it's like winning the lottery again to have it picked up, and then again to have the show stay on the air. — Coby Bell

The center will not hold if it has been spot-welded by an operator whose deepest concern is not with the weld but with his lottery ticket. — Donald Barthelme

When you buy a lottery ticket, you don't know how tickets have been sold. But sold they have been. And there is an underlying distribution for the game. — Robert Haugen

It's like playing the lottery. It doesn't matter how extremely low the chances are of winning. You gotta be in it to win it. Hitting on every girl in sight is like buying a whole lot of lottery tickets. You never know, one day one of them might actually pay off. — Oliver Markus

Tho marriage be a lottery in which there are a wondrous many blanks, yet there is one inestimable lot in which the only heaven on earth is written. — John Vanbrugh

A landscape glittered behind her voice. There were icicles in it and savage fields of ice, great storms boiling over a flat countryside striped with white rails - a chessboard beneath a storm. Horses were stretched forever at the gallop. Tiny men in silk were brave beyond bearing and sat on the horses like embryos with their knees in their mouths. The gorgeous names of horses were cried from mouth to mouth and circulated in a steam of fame. Lottery, The Hermit, the great mare Sceptre; the glorious ancestress Pocahontas, whose blood ran down like time into her flying children; Easter Hero, the Lamb, that pony stallion. — Enid Bagnold

The REAL American Dream is not about a garage full of new cars, winning the lottery, or retiring to a life of ease in Florida. It's about doing work that has meaning, work that makes a difference, and doing that work with people you care about. — Joe Tye

Every time I hear about somebody who wins a never-work-again sum in the lottery but keeps his or her day job I think, not a book person. — Amy Smith

But I am, personally, not a gambler. I wouldn't spend £1 on the lottery, let alone take a punt on a pregnancy. The stakes are far, far too high. I can't agree with a society that would force me to bet on how much I could love under duress. — Caitlin Moran

The late 1990s were good to me. I was doing the Lottery, GMTV and I had a good contract with ITV. But I was working so hard, I never had time to celebrate. I never thought I was lucky. — Anthea Turner

Thankfully the rest of the world assumed that the Irish were crazy, a theory that the Irish themselves did nothing to debunk. They had somehow got it into their heads that each fairy lugged around a pot of gold with him wherever he went. While it was true that LEP had a ransom fund, because of its officers' high-risk occupation, no human had ever taken a chunk of it yet. This didn't stop the Irish population in general from skulking around rainbows, hoping to win the supernatural lottery. — Eoin Colfer

Why do people play the lottery, or why do people gamble, period? You know, it's with the hope of winning something more. — Derek Kilmer

Winning a lottery may prove to be bad luck. — James Cook

Why is time more important than money? There is no time lottery where you can hope to win an extra million days ... — Silvia Hartmann

If all those psychics know the winning lottery numbers, why are they all still working? — Steven Wright

All this to say: I am forty-three years old. I may yet live another forty. What do I do with those years? How do I fill them without Lexy? When I come to tell the story of my life, there will be a line, creased and blurred and soft with age, where she stops. If I win the lottery, if I father a child, if I lose the use of my legs, it will be after she has finished knowing me. "When I get to Heaven", my grandmother used to say, widowed at thirty-nine, "your grandfather won't even recognize me. — Carolyn Parkhurst

It's sad, the lottery. Good projects get funded by it, but there's an air of desperation about it. — Nina Conti

Prosperity argues capacity. Win in the lottery, and behold! you are a clever man. He who triumphs is venerated. Be born with a silver spoon in your mouth! everything lies in that. Be lucky, and you will have all the rest; be happy, and people will think you great. Outside of five or six immense exceptions, which compose the splendor of a century, contemporary admiration is nothing but short-sightedness. — Victor Hugo

If you look at things that really affect people's lives - sport, the arts, charities - they were always at the back of the queue for government money - health, social security, defence, pensions were all way ahead. And each of those areas - sports, the arts, the lottery - got relatively petty cash from the government. — John Major

Life is full of moments that are good - winning a lottery, seeing a beautiful woman, a great dinner - but the whole thing is tragic. It's an oasis that is very pleasant. — Woody Allen

In theory we are all equal before the law. In practice, there are overwhelming privileges that come with winning the birth lottery. — Arianna Huffington

'What was being on the moon literally like?' [ ... ] 'Being on the moon?' His tired gaze inspected the narrow street of cheap jewellery stores, with its office messengers and lottery touts, the off-duty taxi-drivers leaning against their cars. 'It was just like being here.' — J.G. Ballard

I no longer believe love works like a fairy tale but like farming. Most of it is just getting up early and tilling the soil and then praying for rain. But if we do the work, we just might wake up one day to find an endless field of crops rolling into the horizon. In my opinion, that's even better than a miracle. I'd rather earn the money than win the lottery because there's no joy in a reward unless it comes at the end of a story. — Donald Miller

The network shows have this very commercial voice that you have to adhere to, and the cable shows, it's kind of like winning the lottery. The independent film world is a world you can actually get to. You can get the under-a-million-dollar film by finding a good cast and financing. — Jill Soloway

With my father and sister being very depressed for most of their lives, it was incumbent on me to try to make them laugh, in this ridiculous way. They were the wittiest people I knew, but to get a smile from them was like winning the lottery. — Miriam Toews

This is a robbery, boy, gimme them dollars.
We hit the lottery, boy, it's in ya wallets! — RZA

Do you always drink Sprite?" I asked.
"Yeah, why?"
"I want to buy some for when you visit my place."
Bailey grinned like I had told her she won the lottery. If she kept smiling at me that way, I didn't think my ego could fit into the restaurant much longer. — Bijou Hunter

Most people fantasize that if they won the lottery, they would quit their jobs and immerse themselves in leisure, play, family, parenthood, occasional thrilling sex; they'd eat when they were hungry and sleep whenever they felt sleepy. Many people, if they won the lottery and got rich quick, would want to live like elephants. — Carl Safina

Weirdly - but as Danny and Amos had suspected - the further the winning number was from the number on a person's lottery ticket, the less regret they felt. "In defiance of logic, there is a definite sense that one comes closer to winning the lottery when one's ticket number is similar to the number that won," Danny wrote in a memo to Amos, summarizing their data. In another memo, he added that "the general point is that the same state of affairs (objectively) can be experienced with very different degrees of misery," depending on how easy it is to imagine that things might have turned out differently.

Regret was sufficiently imaginable that people conjured it out of situations they had no control over. But it was of course at its most potent when people might have done something to avoid it. What people regretted, and the intensity with which they regretted it, was not obvious. — Michael Lewis

Often we suffer because we don't realize what's essential.
We may want to be rich, but the rich are lonely.
We see all those people on TV that have won the lottery and want to be at their place, but studies show that they are even more miserable after having won the big check. They don't really know what to do with all that money, take poor decisions on how to spend them, change themselves and their friends don't see them in the same way. — Lidiya K.

In Las Vegas we all know that it's the croupiers who win. At the race track, it's those who control the handle who win. State lotteries, does anybody think the participants in the lottery win? No. The state wins. — John C. Bogle

The Power Poker lottery would be won by a person having no ties to any Chicago street gangs or terrorists - Joe Normal. — Ridley Pearson

DNA is not the heart's destiny; the genetic lottery may determine the cards in your deck, but experience deals the hand you can play. — Thomas Lewis

He was right to notice something missing. She had not stated her fundamental view: that, for Duncan, time and place, fortune and misfortune, only had a glancing impact. He was temperamentally condemned to embitterment and would revert to that condition regardless of circumstances, just as lottery winners, after the euphoria, ended up as morose or cheerful as they'd ever been. People did not see the world for what it was but for what they were. — Tom Rachman

Life is a rotten lottery. — John Waters

It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?
By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. — Richard Dawkins

Everyone who loves pro basketball assumes it's a little fixed. We all think the annual draft lottery is probably rigged, we all accept that the league aggressively wants big market teams to advance deep into the playoffs, and we all concede that certain marquee players are going to get preferential treatment for no valid reason. The outcomes of games aren't predeteremined or scripted but there are definitely dark forces who play with our reality. There are faceless puppet masters who pull strings and manipulate the purity of justice. It's not necessarily a full-on conspiracy, but it's certainly not fair. And that's why the NBA remains the only game that matters: Pro basketball is exactly like life. — Chuck Klosterman

Writing is not the lottery. New writers have to be realistic about what it takes to get published. But there is one similarity to the lottery: You have to play to win. — Lori Perkins

What do you want, Zo?"
"What does anyone want, Abby?" he countered. "To be loved. Peace on earth. The winning lottery numbers. — Lisa Mangum

Being an actor is like winning the lottery. It's not really about your talent, it's right time, right place, right face. — Vincent Kartheiser

He was regarded merely as an eccentric employee of indifferent merit, and his post of deputy chief clerk was the highest he would ever reach. Well aware of this, he made it a rule never to show any zeal, except in special circumstances. It is true that in these cases his zeal was clothed with a spirit of vengeance directed against the whole human race - this being his second favourite occupation. Petitbidois would have liked to hold the reins of power. This being beyond his sphere, he utilized the small driblets of authority which came his way for the purpose of casting ridicule upon established law and order, by making it act as a sort of unintelligent and, if possible, malicious Providence. 'The world is an idiot place anyway,' he would say, 'so why worry? Life is just a lottery. Let us leave the decision to chance. — Gabriel Chevallier

So I got to thinking that perhaps that's what money is: a crystallization - or, rather, a homogenization - of time and free will into those things we call dollars and pounds and yen and euros. Money multiplies your time. It also expands your agency and broadens the number of things you can do accordingly. Big-time lottery winners haven't won ten million dollars - they've won ten thousand person-years of time to do pretty much anything they want anywhere on Earth. Windfalls are like the crystal meth version of time and free will. — Douglas Coupland

Someone once referred to modeling as being like winning the lottery gene pool. It's such an odd way to put things, but what is different about modelling is that the industry often picks you. — Erin O'Connor

I don't play the lottery. I don't care what my horoscope says. I think most things about the world could be improved if people thought more about what they're doing. When someone gets upset with their computer, I tend to side with the computer. I think art is overrated, and bridges are underrated. In fact, I don't understand why bridges aren't art. It seems to me they're penalized for having a use. If I make a bridge that ends in midair, that's a sculpture. But put it between two landmasses and let it ferry two hundred thousand cars per day and it's infrastructure. That makes no sense. — Max Barry

Greed arises only because your present moment is empty, and to live in an empty moment hurts very much. To forget it you project greed into the future, thinking that tomorrow things are going to be better, a lottery is going to open in your name. But of course you have to wait for tomorrow, it cannot be just now - and tomorrow never comes. All that comes is always the present moment, which is empty. Greed is because we don't know how to live the present moment in its total richness. — Rajneesh

He comes to us in the brokenness of our health, in the shipwreck of our family lives, in the loss of all possible peace of mind, even in the very thick of our sins. He saves us in our disasters, not from them. He emphatically does not promise to meet only the odd winner of the self-improvement lottery. He meets us all in our endless and inescapable losing. — Robert Farrar Capon

Here's something to think about: How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'? — Jay Leno

God's prayer-line is not a wheel of fortune or lottery for the indolent. — Bryant McGill

I don't regret not coming out early. A lot of people felt that I could have been a lottery pick, but we'll never know. — Michael Finley

Someday we're going to live in St. Leonard's and get away from all this."


"Oh, sure," said Alan easily. The chili was simmering and he was leaning beside the sink, arms crossed over his thin chest, watching Nick work. "When I win the lottery. Or when we start selling your body to rich old ladies."


"If we start selling my body to rich old ladies now," Nick said, "can I quit school?"


"No," Alan answered with a sidelong smile, warm as a whispered secret. "You'll be glad you finished school one day. Aristotle said education is bitter, but its fruits are sweet."


Nick rolled his eyes. "Aristotle can bite me. — Sarah Rees Brennan

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery. — David Mitchell

You can win the lottery, but not an argument. — Marty Rubin

They say getting a show on the air and having it be a success, literally, the odds are like winning the lottery. For me, I've won the lottery several times, so I've been awfully lucky. — Annie Potts

Do you think we enjoy hearing about your brand-new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we're pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You'd last about ten minutes if you were my age these days. — Douglas Coupland

Marriageable girls as well as mothers understand the terms and perils of the lottery called wedlock. That is why women weep at a wedding and men smile. — Honore De Balzac

I won the lottery. I don't care what it costs. — Jack Whittaker

I realize that the future, though invisible, has weight. We are in the gravitational pull of past and future. It takes huge energy -speed of light power- to break the gravitational pull. How many of us ever get free of our orbit? We tease ourselves with fancy notions of free will and self-help courses that direct our lives. We believe we can be our own miracles, and just a lottery win or Mr.right will make the world new. — Jeanette Winterson

At the mention of the name and offence of this degraded being a great sound went up from the entire multitude - a universal cry of execration, not greatly dissimilar from that which may be frequently heard in the crowded Temple of Impartiality when the one whose duty it is to take up, at a venture, the folded papers, announces that the sublime Emperor, or some mandarin of exalted rank, has been so fortunate as to hold the winning number in the Annual State Lottery. — Ernest Bramah

I think people really marry far too much; it is such a lottery after all, and for a poor woman a very doubtful happiness. — Queen Victoria

There may be less of a chance of losing all the money you put into a mutual fund than there is of losing all the money you put into lottery tickets, but you're never going to win big in a mutual fund. — Robert Kiyosaki

The idea of decimation as a lottery converts the new iconography of the Burgess Shale into a radical view about the pathways of life and the nature of history ... May our poor and improbable species find joy in its new-found fragility and good fortune! Wouldn't anyone with the slightest sense of adventure, or the most weakly flickering respect for intellect, gladly exchange the old cosmic comfort for a look at something so weird and wonderful - yet so real - as *Opabinia*? — Stephen Jay Gould

Finding a cat
or having a cat find you
can change your world as much as marriage, divorce, love, death, or even winning the lottery can, and sometimes more. — Kinky Friedman

Sometimes in the middle of a normal day, a life-changing choice is thrown in front of you. Right then, you're one decision away from a completely different existence. You decide your future even though you aren't even aware you're doing it. Your choice might result in finding love or death or winning the fucking lottery - you don't know. — Ilsa Madden-Mills

I'm still in the Dixie Chicks; we haven't broken up ... I love the Dixie Chicks; it's the most fun I've ever had in my life. It was like winning the lottery. — Natalie Maines

But a lottery isn't meaningless. Someone has to win. — J.G. Ballard

Bailee had watched them come in and out of the sheriff's office the week she'd been in jail. She, Sarah, and Lacy had sworn daily that if any one of the three won the lottery to become a husband, the other two women would help their friend become a widow as fast as possible. — Jodi Thomas

Luck works only when you work. Even when it comes to lottery, only those who make the effort to go to a lottery store and buy one, stand a chance to win a lottery". — Pradeep Sarkkar

You could buy a burrito there, a lottery ticket, batteries, tests for various diseases. You could do voice-mail, e-mail, send faxes. It had occurred to Laney that this was probably the only store for miles that sold anything that anyone ever really needed; the others all sold things that he couldn't even imagine wanting. — William Gibson

I despise the Lottery. There's less chance of you becoming a millionaire than there is of getting hit on the head by a passing asteroid. — Brian May