John Tillotson Quotes

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!

Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance.

But, in the name of the experimental method and out of our poor knowledge, are we really entitled to claim that everything happens by chance, to the exclusion of all other possibilities?

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.

A very small cause which escapes our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see, and then we say that the effect is due to chance.

We are all just the tip of a pinprick of the millions of things that had to happen in order for us to be here.

Chance never writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; chance never drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will; nor can it be without absurdity supposed able to do them; which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree.

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?

A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.

If one reads enough books, one has a fighting chance.

It was certainly an accident, an accident caused by a series of circumstances and coincidences

They go in [to the library] not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.

Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos.

Like all photographers, I depend on serendipity I pray for what might be referred to as the angel of chance.

Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her?

We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable product of any definite process.

In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine.

People break down into two groups. When they experience something lucky, group number one sees it as more than luck, more than coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence, that there is someone up there, watching out for them. Group number two sees it as just pure luck. Just a happy turn of chance.

If there is no randomness in the universe, then what do we mean by chaos?

How do we know for sure that no two snowflakes are the same - we haven't got anybody watching.

If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel.

I don’t believe in extraordinary concatenations of coincidence.

Everything's serendipitous and there's no way of knowing who's going to get sick or who's going to get hit by a bus or who's going to fall in love and who's going to get pregnant. All the things that happen, it's up for grabs so it's kind of an exercise in surrender in a way.

Occasionally the impossible happens; this is a truism that accounts for much of what we call good luck; and also, bad.

Accident is veiled necessity.