Selected chance quotes

1. Isn't it a coincidence that you and I are both alive at the same time?

2. Wealthy men can't live in an island that is encircled by poverty. We all breathe the same air. We must give a chance to everyone, at least a basic chance.

3. A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.

4. All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose.

5. One chance is all you need.

6. I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.

7. Chance generally favors the prudent.

8. Chance is always powerful. Let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish.

9. Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought. Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks. The flowers which scatter their odours from time to time in the paths of life, grow up without culture from seeds scattered by chance.

10. I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which, if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again, or perhaps any twig with any property that we would care to call consciousness.

11. The man who said 'I'd rather be lucky than good' saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net and for a split second it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck it goes forward and you win. Or maybe it doesn't and you lose.

12. Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.

13. Man - who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!

14. It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming; she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible. Like two floating logs they met in a head-on rush, caught, and sped along together.

15. There is no such thing as chance; and what seem to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny.

16. The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world's greatest events are not produced, they happen.

17. Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous.

18. Our revolution has made me feel the full force of the axiom that history is fiction and I am convinced that chance and intrigue have produced more heroes than genius and virtue.

19. I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. [:] I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents.

20. She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play.

21. There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.

22. Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be, and similarly everything that depends on art or any rational cause, and especially if it depends on the best of all causes. To entrust to chance what is greatest and most noble would be a very defective arrangement.

23. What we take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of the minutest event-the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small characters by a sharpened feather.

24. 'It's possible, but not interesting,' Lonnrot answered. 'You will reply that reality hasn't the slightest need to be of interest. And I'll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis you have postulated, chance intervenes largely. Here lies a dead rabbi; I should prefer a purely rabbinical explanation; not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber.'

25. Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that can be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right - though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them.

26. Chance and chance alone has a message for us... Only chance can speak to us.

27. Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death. [p.277]

28. One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days, as to fortune or fame.

29. ...only the element of chance is needed to make war a gamble, and that element is never absent.

30. Something must be left to chance; nothing is sure in a sea fight above all.

31. Can any thing in this world be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth can come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!

32. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.

33. 'For me, the most important thing is the element of chance that is built into a live performance. The very great drawback of recorded sound is the fact that it is always the same. No matter how wonderful a recording is, I know that I couldn't live with it--even of my own music--with the same nuances forever.' Quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

34. I said, 'The years with change advance: If I make dark my countenance, I shut my life from happier chance.

35. As Edward P. Tryon of Columbia University once put it: 'In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our universe is simply one of those things that happen from time to time.' To which adds Guth: 'Although the creation of a universe might be very unlikely, Tryon emphasized that no one had counted the failed attempts.'

36. You will say, 'How can chance assemble in one place all the things necessary to produce an oak tree?' My answer is that it would be no miracle if the matter thus arranged had not formed an oak. But it would have been a very great miracle if, once the matter was thus arranged, an oak had not been formed. A few less of some shapes, and it would have been an elm, a poplar, a willow, an elder, heather or moss. A little more of some other shapes and it might have been a sensitive plant, an oyster in its shell, a worm, a fly, a frog, a sparrow, an ape or a man.

37. You are amazed that matter can form a man when matter is all mixed up at random and so many things go into making a person. But do you not realize that before matter forms someone it has also stopped along the way to make a stone, lead, coral, a flower, or a comet because there was too much or too little of it to make a human being? No wonder, then, that an infinite amount of incessantly moving and changing matter makes up the few animals, vegetables and minerals that we see. No wonder, either, that if you throw dice a hundred times, they will all show the same numbers at some point. This movement of matter, then, could not fail to produce something, and whatever it is will always be admired by the unthinking person who does not realize how close it came to not being made.

38. (talking about how he became richest man in the world) 'Hot hand in a dice game baby girl...I'm talking 'bout 6 hours straight, clackity clackity clackity clack!'

39. For most of her existence, Molly had not shied from a truth that most people understood but diligently suppressed: that every moment of every day, depending on the faith we embrace, each of us continues to live either by the merciful sufferance of God or at the whim of blind chance and indifferent nature.

40. How did they meet? By chance, like everybody ... Where did they come from? From the nearest place. Where were they going? Do we know where we are going?

41. I can see ... only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

42. A consistent soul believes in destiny, a capricious one in chance.

43. Will my number come up eventually? Like Love's some kind of lottery, where you scratch and see what's underneath. It's 'Sorry', just one cherry, or 'Play Again.' Get lucky.

44. Fame is like a shaved pig with a greased tail, and it is only after it has slipped through the hands of some thousands, that some fellow, by mere chance, holds on to it!

45. A problem is a chance for you to do your best.

46. Die Leugner des Zufalls. - 'Kein Sieger glaubt an den Zufall.'

47. Accident counts for much in companionship as in marriage.

48. I found a 20 dollar bill once.

49. Stop telling God what to do with his dice.

50. Can anyone alter fate? All of us combined...or one great figure...or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it.

51. It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that if Darwinism was really a theory of chance, it could not work.

52. Remember, Humphrey Bogart was not the first choice for Casablanca; Ronald Reagan was. So maybe if Ronnie had taken the part, Humprey Bogart could have been president. And maybe if you date this guy, you could be president too!

53. O lovely chance, what can I do To give my gratefulness to you? You rise between myself and me With a wise persistency; I would have broken body and soul, But by your grace, still I am whole.

54. Luck was a joke. Even good luck was just bad luck with its hair combed.

55. ... you need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession.