Henri Poincare Quotes

Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about.

No amount of thought can ever reveal what comes unexpectedly.

The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace.

What's crazy about my life is that the biggest things that have happened just happen.

Football works in mysterious ways.

The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.

You never know why something works or doesn't.

It's just such a great miracle when things do work, and they work for such a wild variety of crazy reasons.

Is anything accidental?

Every single moment is a coincidence.

There is no such thing in the world as luck. There never was a man who could go out in the morning and find a purse full of gold in the street to-day, and another to-morrow, and so on, day after day: He may do so once in his life; but so far as mere luck is concerned, he is as liable to lose it as to find it.

It is such a complex matter we live within, it is impossible to track logic and decision making really, so therefore each choice can actually only be seen as coincidence.

History is totally unpredictable.

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.

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities.

Life is so unpredictable.

History is about great forces, yes, but also about contingency.

People are unpredictable at the end of the day.

Much in our lives is chance.

Chance is the fool's name for Fate

Life was a swarm of accidents waiting in the treetops, descending upon any living thing that passed, ready to eat them alive. You swam in a river of chance and coincidence. You clung to the happiest accidents- the rest you let float by.

I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.

It is often to the wary that the events in life are unexpected. Looser types-people who are not busy weighing and measuring every little thing-are used to accidents, coincidences, chance, things getting out of hand, things sneaking up on them. They are the happy children of life, to whom life happens for better or worse.

To talk of luck and chance only shows how little we really know of the laws which govern cause and effect.

Nothing happens by chance, my friend... No such thing as luck.