CHANCE QUOTES
quotations about chance
Or that power
Which erring men call chance.
JOHN MILTON
Comus
Chance is a fire that consumes and leaves no ashes.
KING JOE
Echoes from a Distance
Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when He did not want to sign.
ANATOLE FRANCE
The Garden of Epicurus
For Chance may lift and Chance may dip the scale
Of fortune and misfortune any day.
SOPHOCLES
Antigone
Chance is a kind of religion
Where you're damned for plain hard luck.
U2
"The Playboy Mansion"
Chance seems to us then a good and useful thing, for we discern in it as it were the rudiments of organisation, of an attempt to arrange our lives; and it makes it easy, inevitable, and sometimes -- after interruptions that have made us hope that we may cease to remember -- painful for us to retain in our minds images for the possession of which we shall come in time to believe that we were predestined, and which but for chance we should from the very first have managed to forget, like so many others, so easily.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
If a coin comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal.
But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart.
PHILIP PULLMAN
The Golden Compass
Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day.
SOPHOCLES
Oedipus Rex
Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.
VOLTAIRE
A Philosophical Dictionary
What rules the world, finally, is neither god nor law but incalculable chance. In such a world, there is no privileged space for human dignity, nor even for human freedom.
KENNETH J. RECKFORD
introduction, Euripides
Bad chances were better than no chances.
STEPHEN KING
Under the Dome
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.
SIR WALTER SCOTT
Fortunes of Nigel
If God resides anywhere ... surely he shelters behind barricades of pure chance.
SIMON MAWER
The Gospel of Judas
All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess, to pick it up.
CARLOS CASTANEDA
Journey To Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan
Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
Blood Meridian
Do you think what we call chance is really just the logic of God?
GEORGES BERNANOS
Dialogues des Carmélites
Chance is a kind of god, for it preserves many things which we do not observe.
MENANDER
attributed, Day's Collacon
The successful man is one who had the chance and took it.
ROGER BABSON
attributed, Distilled Wisdom
Chance is like the emperor of a distant country in childhood tales. We talk about it, and it rules our lives, but no one has ever seen it.
RÉMY LESTIENNE
The Creative Power of Chance
For chance is ever raising up the unhappy and casting down the happy, and none can say whether a man's destiny be the one or the other.
SOPHOCLES
Antigone