Quotes About Luck

A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome.

Leaders who have been lucky are never punished for having taken too much risk. Instead, they are believed to have had the flair and foresight to anticipate success, and the sensible people who doubted them are seen in hindsight as mediocre, timid, and weak.

The comparison of firms that have been more or less successful is to a significant extent a comparison between firms that have been more or less lucky.

Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.

But the cadet was probably just lucky on that particular attempt and therefore likely to deteriorate regardless of whether or not he was praised. Similarly, the instructor would shout into a cadet's earphones only when the cadet's performance was unusually bad and therefore likely to improve regardless of what the instructor did. The instructor had attached a causal interpretation to the inevitable fluctuations of a random process.

I smiled and said nothing. But I thought, "Well, I took it away from you this morning. If your success was due mostly to chance, how much credit are you entitled to take for it?

These were my offerings: success = talent + luck great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck

A few lucky gambles can crown a reckless leader with a halo of prescience and boldness.

The more extreme the original score, the more regression we expect, because an extremely good score suggests a very lucky day. The regressive prediction is reasonable, but its accuracy is not guaranteed.

Amos and I stumbled on the central flaw in Bernoulli's theory by a lucky combination of skill and ignorance.

Oh, said the professor sympathetically, teeth, bad? He himself had been lucky, he'd only lost five, Professor Lichtenberg was left with a mere two, and Kästner had been toothless for years.

C'est l'affreuse loterie de la vie

It's so easy to believe, after everything we've seen, that we live in a cold and senseless universe. But as long as we have a world to live in, as long as we have people to love, we are the lucky ones, Zack. We are the blessed.

ultimately life was an elaborate game of providence and probability.

A person has to show some spirit -- fate just about never shines on chickenshits.

In the laughing times we know that we are lucky, and in the quiet times we know that we are blessed. And we will not be alone.

In my experience, luck is more output than input

As the old saying goes, "Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.

But while talent—not to mention fate, luck and tragedy—all play their role in human destiny, they hardly rank as dependable tools for advancing your own art on a day-to-day basis.

As we have seen, nobody is lucky enough not to be born, everybody is unlucky enough to have been born – and particularly bad luck it is.

Life is so terrible, it would have been better not to have been born. Who is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand! Jewish saying

Luck and Joy and Grief and I Set off together into the world of existence Luck lay down and Joy ran off But Grief and I go wandering on.

Hope is not a strategy. Luck is not a factor. Fear is not an option.

Beginners luck or what not in your beginning does not equal long term success only short term