Elizabeth Bowen Quotes

Making plans is a game. Life chooses for you.

There is no doubt such a thing as chance, but I see no reason why Providence should not make use of it.

Much in our lives is chance.

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.

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.

Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.

The web of this world is woven of Necessity and Chance. Woe to him who has accustomed himself from his youth up to find something necessary in what is capricious, and who would ascribe something like reason to Chance and make a religion of surrendering to it.

It is fortune, not wisdom, that rules man's life.

Luck is like an atheistic word for God.

Truly, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach that "above all things there stands the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of accident, the heaven of wantonness".

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

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

I love the fact that it starts from there, and you don't know where it's gonna go. Wait long enough - love will find you. Everything's a surprise. When you think you've got it all figured out... as Emerson said, the dice of God are always loaded.

Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.

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

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.

Though men determine, the gods doo dispose: and oft times many things fall out betweene the cup and the lip.

Man plans, but God decides.

Chance is the fool's name for Fate

What else is chance but the rude stone which receives its life from the sculptor's hand? Providence gives us chance, and man must mould it to his own designs.

If destiny could bring two people together, then it could just as easily tear them apart, and, if it could tear two people apart, then it could just as easily bring them back together again. There was no beginning, middle and end to destiny. It wasn't neat and manageable. It was random and scary.

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

No wonder, said an Ancient, that chance has so much power over us, since it is by chance that we live.

Is there a design in the events of our lives? Or do things just happen, much like a junk yard falling down a staircase? If it's the latter, how do you deal with it?