Adam Clarke Quotes

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

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.

Chance is the fool's name for Fate

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

There is no doubt such a thing as chance, but I see no reason why Providence should not make use of it.

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

Nothing happens by chance, my friend... No such thing as luck.

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.

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

Why does anything ever happen? Some things happen and some don't.

I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.

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

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

These things do not happen by chance. There is much less luck in public affairs than some suppose.

there's no such thing as luck. Nothing ever just happens to anybody. ... nothing can really happen to a person till he lets it happen.

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.

But really, there are no coincidences. Coincidences are just other people's choices, plans you don't know about.

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.

It might have been that notion, or just chance, or its more flamboyant relative, destiny.

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.

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?

There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance.

We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.

Man plans, but God decides.

You can't really explain why things happen.