Charles Sanders Peirce Quotes

Fate is a sempiternal and unchangeable series and chain of things, rolling and unraveling itself through eternal sequences of cause and effect, of which it is composed and compounded.

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

There is no suspense in inevitability.

Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?

If something were brought about without an antecedent cause, it would be untrue that all things come about through fate. But if it is plausible that all events have an antecedent cause, what ground can be offered for not conceding that all things come about through fate?

I don't believe in luck. I believe everything happens for a reason.

Men do not shape destiny, Destiny produces the man for the hour.

Events are not a matter of chance.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect is already in the cause.

I believe in fate.

I do not believe such a quality as chance exists. Every incident that happens must be a link in a chain.

There are no accidents in my philosophy. Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future. All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the finite to the infinite.

All things happen by virtue of necessity.

Men speak of blind destiny, a thing without scheme or purpose. But what sort of destiny is that? Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it another yet. In a vast endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in the maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life.

Whatever may happen to thee, it was prepared for thee from all eternity.

Nothing ever happens by chance; everything is pushed from behind.

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

My life experience has taught me nothing happens by chance. Even the idea of the ball in a roulette game: it's not chance it ends up in a certain place. It's forces that are at play.

I assert that nothing ever comes to pass without a cause.

Fate is the endless chain of causation, whereby things are; the reason or formula by which the world goes on.

Character and fate are two words for the same thing.

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

I think everything is pretty well preordained - even your mistakes.

Destiny waits alike for the free man as well as for him enslaved by another's might.