Charles Dickens Quotes

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.

Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me, for no good reason at all.

A belief in the purposeful complexity of Fate is always more comforting than random, straightforward facts

In the West, it was believed that attitude and ambition saved you. In Africa, we had learned that no one was immune to capricious tragedy.

Life is full of chances and changes, and the most prosperous of men may in the evening of his days meet with great misfortunes.

There is always some accident in the best things, whether thoughts or expressions or deeds. The memorable thought, the happy expression, the admirable deed are only partly ours.

I also don't believe that "everything happens for a reason," which is in a similar category of world-views.

Many men, seemingly impelled by fortune, hasten forward to meet misfortune half way.

Woe to him who would ascribe something like reason to Chance, and make a religion of surrendering to it.

Alas! we are the sport of destiny.

Not only ought fortune to be pictured on a wheel, but every thing else in this world.

No man can ever be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune.

Life just doesn't care about our aspirations, or sadness. It's often random, and it's often stupid and it's often completely unexpected, and the closures and the epiphanies and revelations we end up receiving from life, begrudgingly, rarely turn out to be the ones we thought.

How fortune brings to earth the over-sure!

Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.

Man appoints, and God disappoints.

Chance determines our lives in important ways.

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.

Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.

Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.

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

I say the one thing about luck is you can't really count on it.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

Doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune.

Everything that happens is meant to be. It's meant to happen like that. But sometimes you don't know at the time that it's meant to be disaster.