Michel de Montaigne Quotes

Everybody believes in chance.

Chance ... must be something more than the name we give to our ignorance.

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

So much of life is happenstance. It makes me laugh when I go to a bookstore and see all those titles about controlling your life. You're lucky if you can control your bladder.

In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.

A reasonable probability is the only certainty.

Everything is chance, or nothing is chance. If I believed the first, I would be unable to live on, but I am not yet fully convinced of the second.

I moreover affirm that our wisdom itself, and wisest consultations, for the most part commit themselves to the conduct of chance.

Used to think that luck wuz luck and nuthin' else but luck-- It made no diff'rence how or when or where or why it struck; But sev'ral years ago I changt my mind, an' now proclaim That luck's a kind uv science--same as any other game.

I think that's as far as you have to think, everything happens as a coincidence. It either happens or it doesn't. It's hard to map out a strategic plan by saying, 'If I do that, that's going to get me to the next level.' I think that's the wrong way to go into movies as an actor. It doesn't happen for me that way.

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

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.

Much in our lives is chance.

These things do not happen by chance. There is much less luck in public affairs than some suppose.

Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word. Perhaps our gut feeling that it cannot be so reflects only our hopes and prejudices, our desperate striving to make sense of a complex and confusing world, and not the ways of nature.

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

I was not sure I wanted to issue orders to life; I rather liked the Greek notion of allowing Chance to take a formative hand in my affairs.

In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment.

Play is experimenting with chance.

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

Life is a chance, a story is a chance. That I am here is a chance.

The threads of circumstance that lead to tomorrow are so tenuous that all the fussing and worrying about decisions is futile compared to the pure randomness of existence.

After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.

No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance. And through the element of chance, guesswork and luck come to play a great part in war.

Almost all life depends on probabilities.