Aristotle Quotes

Nothing is necessitated whose opposite is possible.

One shouldn't know the future.

Do yourself a favor. Don't ever say to me, 'Everything happens for a reason.'

Why does anything ever happen? Some things happen and some don't.

Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.

I don't believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability.

Events are not a matter of chance.

Nothing is inevitable until it happens.

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

I disagree with the idea that everything happens for a reason.

There is no such thing as chance or accident; the words merely signify our ignorance of some real and immediate cause.

The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.

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

I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started.

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.

If infinity is as they describe it, all things are not just possible but in the end certain.

In a universe governed by God there are no chance events. Indeed, there is no such thing as chance. Chance does not exist. It is merely a word we use to describe mathematical possibilities. But chance itself has no power because it has no being. Chance is not an entity that can influence reality. Chance is not a thing. It is nothing.

The "determinist" swears that if we knew everything we should also be able to deduce and foretell the conduct of every man in every circumstance, and that is obvious enough. But the expression "know everything" means nothing.

When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.

I do not believe anything comes by chance. I regard the present as the necessary child of a necessary past.

The National Academy of Sciences would be unable to give a unanimous decision if asked whether the sun would rise tomorrow.

Character and fate are two words for the same thing.

I have always believed that all things depended upon Fortune, and nothing upon ourselves.

Is anything accidental?

A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be.