Mark Twain Quotes

The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we're not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.

My life is a series of things that just happen.

Luck has a lot to do with how your life develops.

My life is a big accident, so where I end up, I think it's all accidents.

Some people are very lucky, and have the story in their heads. I've never storyboarded anything. I like the idea of chance. What makes God laugh is people who make plans.

Luck is going to play a huge part in your life.

Chance determines our lives in important ways.

Much of what we do in life has a huge component of luck.

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

I don't believe chance can play a role in my literature.

The older you get, the more you realise how happenstance... has helped to determine your path through life.

I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all.

I'd love to claim that what I have done in my life is of my doing, but it's not of my doing at all. I've blown around in the wind like a mad thing, influenced by this and that - like a piece of paper: like the boy in that scene in 'American Beauty' watching a piece of paper blowing hither and thither.

There's a lot of things in life that we don't know why they're coming exactly at this moment.

I respond very easily to outside events. One's life is a matter of chance. Nothing that you've arranged for yourself works out.

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.

He [the historian] should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

Don't be surprised at Fortune's turns and twists: That wheel has spun a thousand yarns before.

I think things just happen to people. That's healthier, I feel, than believing there's some grand scheme where your story is already inscribed in the Book of Life. Books get rewritten.

You have to realize that a lot of life is just fortune and the ebbs of flows of what goes on.

It is really strange how life works, isn't it?

I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder.

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

Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.