Quotes About Chance

Anything can happen to anyone, but it usually doesn't. Except when it does.

he walked away understanding, (...) how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made... on the other hand, how accidental fate may seem when things can never turn out other than they do.

Son, anything can happen to anyone, my father told me, but it usually doesn't.

Sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you're not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance—the tyranny of contingency—is everything. Chance is what I believed Mr. Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God.

what his uneducated father had been trying so hard to teach him all along: of the terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.

Nothing that befalls anyone is too senseless to have happened.

Pensava gli stessi pensieri, inutili per un uomo di non grande talento come lui, se non per Sofocle: la casualità con cui si forma un destino... E come tutto può sembrare accidentale, quando è inevitabile.

Relying on luck, however, does not constitute a policy.

Be lucky, Xander, and be brave. You will find that bravery and luck are often bedfellows.

Every baby born is a gamble, but that doesn't stop the human race from making babies, does it?

There were guys who prayed at Tarawa,' said Ishmael. 'They still got killed, Mother. Just like the guys who didn't pray. It didn't matter either way.

All human giving is fiction giving. Only the Absolute nonfictively owns; hence only the Absolute can nonfictively give; hence the mortal who believes that he or she owns, stands no chance of receiving what the Absolute has to nonfictively give.

Little less than a promise, and a little more than a chance.

Every person is a possibility. The hopeless romantics feel it most acutely, but even for others, the only way to keep going is to see every person as a possibility.

We didn't believe in fate, but we believed in serendipity. We felt very lucky.

Fate has a strange way of making plans.

Sometimes you make plans. Sometimes plans make themselves.

We always loved to say 'If I'd had a Monday-morning class, I never would have met you'. Or 'If you'd been reading something else, none of this would have happened'. We didn't believe in fate, but we believed in serendipity. We felt very lucky.

In Sliding Doors, the whole idea is that every choice you make, and every single thing that happens to you changes the trajectory of your life, and once you are put on that trajectory, there is no way back. But Groundhog Day - which, I tell him, also happens to be a much better movie - says the opposite. It says if you mess up or make the wrong choice, you just have to keep at it until you do it right.

Let's make plans," I ventured. And Sofia smiled and said, "No, let's leave it to chance.

Person after person after person... they all converge at one moment, irrevocably changing the course of a thousand more live. As it is with accidents, so it is with love.

Maybe fate's arithmetic is so diffuse that it's not arithmetic at all.

Love weaves itself from hundreds of threads. Happenstances. I just happened to be one of them.

I am liking him enough to know that a different time and a different place might have led to a different outcome. But since I'm not planning on leaving this time or place anytime soon, it's not a point worth making.