Quotes About Chance

So much of what happens by chance forms what becomes of your life….I suppose I must be grateful, for I seem to have been headed this way all along.

Neither the mob nor Vegas could exist if most people weren't optimists

Chess looks like a zero-sum game; if one loses, the other wins—until a dog trots by and knocks over the table, spills the beer, and leaves you both worse off than before.

It would seem we have small chance but to be dutiful in the end.

In a moment, she would be gone, taking with her my chance of obtaining some answers on which my life might depend.

After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents-a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.

In a manner of speaking,' he sighed. 'After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents – a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.

After presenting his completed sequences, he analysed the errors the others had made. You should never have thrown away the knave of hearts, he told Dina. That's why you lost. I took a chance.

I am simultaneously and contradictorily both happy and unhappy: 'to succeed' or 'to fail' have for me only ephemeral, contingent meanings (this does not stop my desires and sorrows from being violent ones); what impels me, secretly and obstinately, is not tactical: I accept and I affirm, irrespective of the true and the false, of success and failure; I am withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance...

It proved to be the luckiest stroke of his career.

It is, in my opinion, the opportunity of a lifetime, one of those opportunities, the seizing or failing to seize, which marks the difference between success and failure in life."84

Sixteenth-century litigation combined the qualities of tedium, hardship, brutality, and injustice that tested character and endurance, with the element of pure chance that appealed to the gambler, the fear of defeat and ruin, and the hope of victory and humiliation of the enemy. It had everything that war can offer except the delights of shedding blood.

I'd never believed in luck. Never had any cause to. Never relied on it, because I never could.

anything. He could end up with seven-to-ten

was slow, so we took a chance and got out again back

have gambled and stalled.

Realistic. Dispassionate. Overall he figured there was a good chance of success. Either Karel would let it go, or he wouldn't, multiplied by either he was close by, or he wasn't. Two coin tosses in a row. Disaster priced at four to one, success at four to three. Numbers didn't lie. No cognitive bias.

Reacher thought, damn. The vagaries of chance.

it was a coincidence. No point going over and over it. I was only in Margrave because of a crazy last-minute whim. If I'd taken a minute longer looking at the guy's map, the bus would have been past the cloverleaf and I'd have forgotten all about Margrave.

The Marines might grab you first. Fate worse than death.

All the guys Reacher had ever known, fraud, theft, homicide, and treason, right up to the very end believed there was some chance of getting away with it, and therefore something should be salvaged, if possible. No one wanted to start over with nothing.

A real coin flipped by a real human trended closer to 51-49 in favor of whichever side was uppermost at the outset.

Say what you like about melodrama, it beats confusion. The truth is we ought have a chance to say a little something when it's getting dark. We ought to have a closing scene.

And, indeed, the most obvious lesson of the work as a whole, for statesmen and others alike, is the sobering one that as long as our species remains, we must reckon on a human nature that will again and again, when given the chance, overpower the fragile restraints of law and justice.