Quotes About Fate

Luck is the grand equalizer.

The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior. Good luck.

Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason.

If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small. If you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand. Nothing. And when you take risks, insults by half-men, small men, those who don't risk anything, are similar to barks by non-human animals. You can't feel insulted by a dog.

in Arabic it is called Shhm—best translated as nonsmall. If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.

Stoicism, seen this way, becomes pure robustness—for the attainment of a state of immunity from one's external circumstances, good or bad, and an absence of fragility to decisions made by fate, is robustness. Random events won't affect us either way (we are too strong to lose, and not greedy to enjoy the upside), so we stay in the middle column of the Triad.

Seneca's version of that Stoicism is antifragility from fate. No downside from Lady Fortuna, plenty of upside.

When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place.

If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.

our successes depend on randomness).

cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.

in real life, every single bit of risk you take adds up to reduce your life expectancy.

One of the methods, called sortes virgilianae (fate as decided by the epic poet Virgil), involved opening Virgil's Aeneid at random and interpreting the line that presented itself as direction for the course of action. You should use such method for every sticky business decision. I will repeat until I get hoarse: the ancients evolved hidden and sophisticated ways and tricks to exploit randomness. For

You feel less guilty for not having avoided certain events; you feel less responsible for it. Things appear as if they were bound to happen.

For those readers who wonder about the difference between Buddhism and Stoicism, I have a simple answer. A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says "f*** you" to fate.

There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck.

The occurrence of a highly improbable event is the equivalent of the nonoccurrence of a highly probable one

just as we tend to underestimate the role of luck in life in general, we tend to overestimate it in games of chance.

Just as those who live by the sword die by the sword, those who earn their living taking risks will lose their livelihood taking risks.

If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.

One of life's machinations is to make some people both rich and unhappy, that is, jointly fragile and deprived of hope.

I may never know if Onassis was skilled or lucky, though I am convinced that his charm opened doors for him

otherwise the odds would be too low to get here just by luck.

Had it not been for the discovery of antibiotics, only a few decades earlier, I would not be here today.