Quotes About Chance

Well, I guess that's why they let the horses run the races. Sometimes a horse will surprise you and win.

Sometimes bad luck is really dumb actions or inaction. You can make your own luck by making smart decisions.

That story had at its core a discussion of my fundamental view that nothing in life is certain and that, consequently, all decisions are about probabilities.

Let us remember that all actions, good, bad and indifferent, are the necessary children of conditions—that there is no chance in the natural world in which we live.

Lightning doesn't strike twice.

In the depths of his tiredness, surrounded by these blank, sheep-like visages, he found himself pondering the accidents that had brought all of them into being. Every birth was, viewed properly, mere chance. With a hundred million sperm swimming blindly through the darkness, the odds against a person becoming themselves were staggering.

Who was more conscious than the soldier of capricious fortune, of the random roll of the dice?

Leda, Lula and Rochelle had not been women like Lucy, or his Aunt Joan; they had not taken every reasonable precaution against violence or chance; they had not tethered themselves to life with mortgages and voluntary work, safe husbands and clean-faced dependants: their deaths, therefore, were not classed as 'tragic', in the same way as those of staid and respectable housewives.

Don't turn your back, don't show your profile, You'll never know when it's your turn to go.

They were separated by infinite disparities, by the lotteries of birth and chance, by faults of judgement and lucky breaks.

They were separated by infinite disparities, by the lotteries of birth and chance, by faults of judgment and lucky breaks.

Oh no, you do not get any choice in the matter. What you are likely to see is determined by the probabilities for the various quantum states. What you actually see is a matter of random choice. You do not get to choose what will happen; the quantum amplitudes only give the probability of different results, but they do not fix what will happen. That is pure chance and only becomes fixed when an observation is made.

In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?

It is either coincidence piled on top of coincidence," said Hollus, "or it is deliberate design.

a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable.

Time to toss the dice

Nevertheless these first readings will give us a chance to think about a matter that we would certainly consider to be at the heart of economics—the drive to gain wealth.

Them that die'll be the lucky ones.

Opportunities will present themselves. Recognize them, act on them.

It is also a near-perfect summary of what happens in the void of war and how history is more often than not a messy combination of intention, courage, preparation, and chance. If

It means that your birth, with all your particulars, is a wildly improbable event, and hence precious. You won the sweepstakes by being born at all. Think of all the wallflower sperm and egg cells. You made it, buddy. Whew! What a staggering wonder! What a thing to rejoice in! The lottery wasn't fixed! God didn't rig it! You won fair and square! What a miracle!

the odds are good, but the goods are odd

when that small Siberian bird fell out of the sky over Gray's River, not once but twice, he brought with him the sweetness of chance in any place, the certainty of wonder in all places. And if that's not grace, I don't know what it.

It was the best opportunity to invest. The economy was terrible. I just could not pass up these small deals.