Selected luck quotes

1. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

2. A lot of girls ask for advice on how to get into acting, and I'm kind of the worst person to ask, because it just kind of fell in my lap... I was just in the right place at the right time.

3. Aren't I lucky, to have survived so much bad luck.

4. I've been lucky. I'll be lucky again.

5. This type of man who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evils of wisdom shall not spread further throughout mankind.

6. I am a lucky man. I have had a dream and it has come true, and that is not a thing that happens often to men.

7. Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

8. All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.

9. A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.

10. I can't help but notice that everytime I fly somewhere, other people's planes fall out of the sky.

11. People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.

12. Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny.

13. Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

14. The two prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.

15. The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.

16. God often gives nuts to toothless people.

17. I used to refer to myself as Typhoid Mary. It wasn't that I was jinxed, I just seemed to bring ill fortune to anybody I was close to.

18. Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.

19. I had some good opportunities. I was lucky to have had the chance to do things differently. Architecture is about surprise.

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

21. Fortune and love favor the brave.

22. Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck.

23. You win a few, you lose a few. Some get rained out. But you got to dress for all of them.

24. Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I'd put myself in the latter category. But I'd never call myself a normal designer of anything.

25. I got food poisoning today. I don't know when I'll use it.

26. Even the losers get lucky sometimes. Even the losers keep a little bit of pride. They get lucky sometimes.

27. Fortune rarely accompanies anyone to the door.

28. It is the fortunate who should extol fortune.

29. 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.

30. The meeting of preparation with opportunity generates the offspring we call luck.

31. I'm Irish and I was born on St. Patrick's Day. I'm lucky sevens.

32. When it comes to luck you make your own.

33. No one I met at this time - doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients - failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.

34. Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery or simple bad luck.

35. I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

36. 'It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.'

37. I feel really privileged to be an actor, to be paid to do something I love.

38. The harder I work the luckier I get.

39. I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.

40. 'Tis hard if all is false that I advance, A fool must now and then be right by chance.

41. 'Could you try not aiming so much?' he asked me, still standing there. 'If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck.' He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. 'How can it be luck if I aim?' I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. 'Because it will be,' he said. 'You'll be glad if you hit his marble - Ira's marble - won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it.'

42. The fortunate man is the one who cannot take more than a couple of drinks without becoming intoxicated. The unfortunate wight is the one who can take many glasses without betraying a sign; who must take numerous glasses in order to get the kick.

43. Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.

44. We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?

45. See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.

46. I never really had an interest in it in the beginning. Nicolas Cage -we had some mutual friends - introduced me to his agent. She sent me to a casting director, and I auditioned for the first Nightmare on Elm Street. I got the job. I was stupefied. They paid me all that money for a week. It was luck, and accident. I did it purely to pay the rent. I was literally filling out job applications at the time, any kind of job. Nic Cage said, ' You should try being an actor. Maybe you are one and don't know it.' I began acting, and I thought, Well, this is an interesting road; maybe I should keep traveling on it. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, so I started to read everything about acting-Stanislavsky, Uta Hagen, Michael Chekhov. I started soaking it up.

47. Fate presented itself to some like a chinese fan--one side black, the other side gilded with flowers.

48. I think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they're good or there because they're lucky.

49. Not everyone is lucky enough to understand how delicious it is to suffer.

50. I'm a songwriter but she [Melua] has her songs written for her... She must think it's her fucking lucky day... It's not like she's singing old songs like Jamie [Cullum], she's singing shit new songs that her manager writes for her.

51. Seven thirty-nine, more than three hundred miles to the north and east, Jack Reacher climbed out of his motel room window. One minute earlier, he had been in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. One minute before that, he had opened the door of his room to check the morning temperature. He had left it open, and the closet just inside the entrance passageway was faced with mirrored glass, and there was a shaving mirror in the bathroom on a cantilevered arm, and by a freak of optical chance he caught sight of four men getting out of a car and walking toward the motel office. Pure luck, but a guy as vigilant as Jack Reacher gets lucky more times than the average.

52. I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work - just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege.

53. I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment. (p. 36e)

54. Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky.

55. I found a 20 dollar bill once.

56. Somebody said to me this morning, 'To what do you attribute your longevity?' I don't know. I mean, I couldn't have planned my life out better. By all accounts I should be dead! The abuse I put my body through: the drugs, the alcohol, the lifestyle I've lived the last 30 years! Now, some rare fly will fly over me, crap on my shoulder, and I'll drop dead, you know? My life story is a real-life story.

57. Fortune is not satisfied with inflicting one calamity.

58. If I found any new truths in the sciences, I can say that they follow from, or depend on, five or six principal problems which I succeeded in solving and which I regard as so many battles where the fortunes of war were on my side.

59. We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

60. 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!

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

62. Now and then it occurs to one to reflect upon what slender threads of accident depend the most important circumstances of his life; to look back and shudder, realizing how close to the edge of nothingness his being has come.

63. I see that luck resembles women: it prefers a young king than an old emperor.

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