William James Quotes

It is no great wonder if in long process of time, while fortune takes her course hither and thither, numerous coincidences should spontaneously occur. If the number and variety of subjects to be wrought upon be infinite, it is all the more easy for fortune, with such an abundance of material, to effect this similarity of results.

Nothing happens quite by chance. It's a question of accretion of information and experience ... it's just chance that I happened to be here at this particular time when there was available and at my disposal the great experience of all the investigators who plodded along for a number of years.

When a coincidence seems amazing, that's because the human mind isn’t wired to naturally comprehend probability & statistics.

Random questions are the least random of all questions.

Figures don't lie, but liars figure.

Gambling is the great leveller. All men are equal- at cards.

While we can prove that almost all numbers in the continuum are random, we cannot prove that any specific number is indeed random.

My lucky number is four billion. That doesn't come in real handy when you're gambling. "Come on, four billion! Darn! Seven. Not even close. I need more dice."

So much of life is happenstance. It makes me laugh when I go to a bookstore and see all those titles about controlling your life. You're lucky if you can control your bladder.

Random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance. ~Jubal Harshaw

Fate does not jest and events are not a matter of chance. There is no existence out of nothing.

Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.

Fate laughs at probabilities.

In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.

Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin. For, as has been pointed out several times, there is no such thing as a random number - there are only methods to produce random numbers, and a strict arithmetic procedure of course is not such a method.

Bad things can happen to anyone at any time, whether you follow the rules or not.

Life consists of a long chain of coincidences.

This equation of the impersonal plus time plus chance producing the total configuration of the universe and all that is in it, modern people hold by faith.

If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.'

A reasonable probability is the only certainty.

In practice, a good deal of the outcomes produced by the market reflect nothing more than luck - good or bad.

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

Everything is chance, or nothing is chance. If I believed the first, I would be unable to live on, but I am not yet fully convinced of the second.

We've taken disturbances and fluctuations and averaged them together to give us comfortable statistics. Our training has been to look for big numbers, important trends, major variances. Yet it is the slight variations - soft-spoken, even whispered at first - that we need to encourage.

Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.