Quotes About Chance

Films are all luck and anarchy.

MAN DOES WHAT HE CAN, CHANCE DOES WHAT IT WILL.

We would have met again some other time or in some other place,' he said. 'We would have been given other chances. Life recognizes the unpredictability of our movements in any given life. Somehow we would have met, Jane. We were determined that it would be so before we entered this life.

Yet now he felt that perhaps he had missed one of the few chances life offered to step off the wheel of routine and familiarity and duty to discover if there was joy somewhere beyond its turning.

Let us see if there is justice upon the earth, or if we are ruled by chance.

No human actions are truly random

Well, I was never in luck's way long.

Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that isn't it

I learned that year that nothing is so unpredictable as who will survive a war and who won't.

But the history of science teaches that most discoveries were made by several people independently from each other, at more or less the same time; and this fact alone (apart from all other considerations) is sufficient to show that when the time is ripe for a given type of invention or discovery, the favourable chance event which sparks it off is bound to occur sooner or later.

Thus one should not underestimate ripeness as a factor facilitating discoveries which, as the saying goes, are 'in the air'-meaning, that the various components which will go into the new synthesis are all lying around and only waiting for the trigger-action of chance, or the catalysing action of an exceptional brain, to be assembled and welded together. If one opportunity is missed, another will occur.

The memoir did in fact get him a professorship at the Lycee in Lyon. It was called Considerations of the Mathematical Theory of Games of Chance, and demonstrated, among other things, the habitual gamblers are, in the long run, bound to lose.

I merely wish to point out that some of the major break-throughs in the history of science represent such dramatic tours de force, that 'ripeness' seems a very lame explanation, and 'chance' no explanation at all. Einstein discovered the principle of relativity 'unaided by any observation that had not been available for at least fifty years before'; the plum was overripe, yet for half a century nobody came to pluck it.

Charles Gabór sits with four other westerners, an unlikely group pieced together these past few weeks from parties and family references, friend-of-friend-of-friend happenstance, and (in one case, just now being introduced) sheer, scarcely tolerable intrusiveness--five people who, in normal life back home, would have been satisfied never to have known one another.

Fate shuffles the cards and we play.

La vita e i sogni sono fogli di uno stesso libro. Leggerli in ordine è vivere, sfogliarli a caso è sognare.

Das Schicksal mischt die Karten, und wir spielen.

El azar reparte las cartas pero nosotros las jugamos.

Das Schicksal mischt die Karten, wir spielen.

They were strangers who had met in a chance encounter. They had known each other before Life began. (310)

For all but our most recent history, death was a common, ever-present possibility. It didn't matter whether you were five or fifty. Every day was a roll of the dice.

Yet although the odds were against me, it wasn't as if I had no chance of succeeding.

The likelihood of my initial hunch being right was too low

Such successes are not quite the result of logical thinking. But they are not the result of mere luck, either.