Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 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.

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

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

He [the historian] should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

I realized that there are no certainties in life. You can't manipulate fate.

After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.

There's good chances and bad chances, and nobody's luck is pulled only by one string.

Take it from me, Fate doesn't care most of the time.

Fortune, not wisdom, rules lives.

But as the unthought-on accident is guilty To what we wildly do, so we profess Ourselves to be the slaves of chance, and flies Of every wind that blows.

Don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them.

Everything's serendipitous and there's no way of knowing who's going to get sick or who's going to get hit by a bus or who's going to fall in love and who's going to get pregnant. All the things that happen, it's up for grabs so it's kind of an exercise in surrender in a way.

Life does not play with marked cards.Winning or losing is part of it.

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.

Chance is a name for our ignorance.

My life is a big accident, so where I end up, I think it's all accidents.

It's a lot like life. I think 99 percent of what goes on in life, we have very little control over.

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.

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?

My life is a series of things that just happen.

Much of what we do in life has a huge component of luck.

You never know what's going to happen and when it's going to happen.