B. F. Skinner Quotes

In my life, things have happened to me. I've never felt I was controlling anything.

The jellyfish doesn't actively move anywhere - it's just moved with the tides. Is that what man is? Man's just the jellyfish: stuff happens to you, and you get twisted in different directions.

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.

Wherefore the race being not to the swift, etc. but time and chance happening to all men, I leave the Judgement of the whole to the Candid, of whose correction I shall never be impatient.

Fate pulls you in different directions.

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

I respond very easily to outside events. One's life is a matter of chance. Nothing that you've arranged for yourself works out.

I don't go through life thinking I'm on a conveyer belt I can't jump off, but sometimes it's helpful to think that things are out of your control.

You pick your destiny or maybe destiny picks you. But it picked me to box, definitely.

i think of all the thousands of billions of steps and missteps and chances and coincidences that have brought me here. Brought you here, and it feels like the biggest miracle in the world.

You often meet your fate on the road you take to avoid it.

Luck serves ... as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.

I'm a victim of maybe circumstances, but look at how it worked out.

The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we're not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.

Man is the creature of circumstances.

How shall a man escape from that which is written; How shall he flee from his destiny?

You can't even kill yourself if it isn't your time to go. People have no control whatsoever over what happens to them, and they are beginning to realize this. The future lies in the time of living. Your doing something will get you into tomorrow, if you want to call it tomorrow. If you want to make those distinctions at all.

I was thinking about how fleeting and precious life is. Life is also arbitrary. For example, the choices that you make, the luck of being born into the right bed, to parents who support and help you and who love you. That doesn't always happen - and then, what happens when it doesn't?

I've never guided my life. I've just been whipped along by the waves I'm sitting in. I don't make plans at all. Plans are what make God laugh. You can make plans, you can make so many plans, but they never go right, do they?

Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.

I feel like everything I ever did in my life led me to the Franklin Mint.

It's choice - not chance - that determines your destiny.

Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.

I don't think there's any accidents in my life.

Fortuitous circumstances constitute the moulds that shape the majority of human lives, and the hasty impress of an accident is too often regarded as the relentless decree of all ordaining fate.