Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

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

It's very rare when we are in control of everything. Sure, I can learn my lines, I can know my character really well, but there are so many factors going on throughout the day.

Life is anything but predictable.

You can't really explain why things happen.

I tend to view my life as an accident, almost as a dream.

You never know how life turns out.

There is no such thing as chance or accident; the words merely signify our ignorance of some real and immediate cause.

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

Man's life is ruled by fortune, not by wisdom.

To talk of luck and chance only shows how little we really know of the laws which govern cause and effect.

Fate rules the affairs of men, with no recognizable order.

Fate is unpenetrated causes.

Direct interference in a person's life does not enter our scope of activity, nor, on the other, tralatitiously speaking, hand, is his destiny a chain of predeterminate links: some 'future' events may be linked to others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.

The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dice box in hand, shaking the dice.

It's a funny old world. A man's lucky if he gets out of it alive.

It is fortune, not wisdom, that rules man's life.

The older I get, the more obvious it is that you're not really in control of your life, you're a part of a larger wave, no matter who you are.

When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.

Tho' there be no such Thing as Chance in the World; our Ignorance of the real Ccause of any Event has the same Influence on the Understanding, and begets a like Species of Belief or Opinion.

It's hard to believe in coincidence, but it's even harder to believe in anything else.

Everybody believes in chance.

Anything can happen, but it usually doesn't.

We can never tell what is in store for us.

How true it is that our destinies are decided by nothings and that a small imprudence helped by some insignificant accident, as an acorn is fertilized by a drop of rain, may raise the trees on which perhaps we and others shall be crucified.

It doesn't matter how anything happens.