Quotes About Chance

One error at the beginning is quite likely just that.

At certain junctures in the course of existence, unique moments occur when everyone and everything, even the most distant stars, combine to bring about something that could not have happened before and will never happen again. Few people know how to take advantage of these critical moments, unfortunately, and they often pass unnoticed. When someone does recognize them, however, great things happen in the world.

Oh, nothing can happen more than once, but all things must happen one day.

God really wants to talk to us. He tried Scripture, he tries the still small voice, but we're all unbelievers now, so he mainly speaks to us through a conspiracy of accidents.

Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking. [Dick Cramer]

The world's not just a stage. It's a casino, and our lives are games of chance. And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making judgments about similarity—or (strange new word!) representativeness. You

That was the reason the casino bothered to list the wheel's most recent spins: to help gamblers to delude themselves.

Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck—and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.

big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are.

The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don't know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired. In

It's really hard to know when you're lucky and when you're smart.

The math of the matter changed with the situation, but, broadly speaking, an attempted steal had to succeed about 70 percent of the time before it contributed positively to run totals.

Even the fairest coin, however, given the limitations of its memory and moral sense, cannot be as fair as the gambler expects it to be," they wrote. In an academic journal that line counted as a splendid

But because he has misjudged how large the sample needs to be if it is to stand a good chance of reflecting the entire population, he is at the mercy of luck.

The draft has never been anything but a fucking crapshoot," Billy had taken to saying, "We take fifty guys and we celebrate if two of them make it. In what other business is two for fifty a success? If you did that in the stock market, you'd go broke.

The job of the decision maker wasn't to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well.

Kelly Heath had played second base in the Royals organization, and had exactly one major league at bat, in 1982, after the Royals regular second baseman, Frank White, decided in the middle of a game that his hemorrhoids were bothering him. As one of the other scouts put it, Kelly was the only player in history whose entire big league career was made possible by a single asshole. Chris Pittaro had played second base for

those who had risked everything at a riverbend on a left turn and so discovered a fortune.

sister's epilepsy. By the time I began working with him the golden years of doping were almost over. Thirty-four million people were attending greyhound races a year. But now the racing clubs were setting up saliva and urine tests, so The Darter needed to find another solution where betting on dogs would once again not rely only on logic and talent. What followed was The Darter's use of imposters or ringers in order to bring confusion and chance back to the

There's water in my bones a ghost of a chance

There is no such thing as replacing Chris Berman, but the chance to build on his incredible legacy while simultaneously taking new risks to serve NFL fans is the opportunity of a lifetime.

Luck really has nothing to do with human existence, since God is not a random God.

Everybody's got a puncher's chance in this game. I mean every single person on Earth. But my whole focus, my whole style, my whole dynamic is built around taking that power away from you. So where is the logic in why you're different from anybody else? There is no logic in it.

I remember, growing up, losing a sister, and - life is short. Make the most of your opportunities.