fortuity Quotes

Life will always remain a gamble, with prizes sometimes for the imprudent, and blanks so often to the wise.

Chance favours the trained mind.

... by chance you will say, but chance only favors the mind which is prepared.

Things happen for a reason.

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.

That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.

I throw down the gauntlet to chance. For example, I prepare the ground for a picture by cleaning my brush over the canvas. Spilling a little turpentine can also be helpful.

Chance is a second master.

There's always a chance. Anything can happen.

You know, the process, I think, is the story. And it goes back, again, to what I said about chance and about radical contingency, the idea that all of this is this well-oiled machine that's been reared up and, like, really articulated and thought about.

Any memory for the most part depending on chance.

Chance arrives unannounced. It emerges, and when it leaves, we are lucky if the changes it has produced are only external.

I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.

When I contemplated purpose I also contemplated chance and foolishness.

I don't believe in fate, as in, which I - as a Catholic, I think, sort of predestination. But I certainly believe in chance.

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

No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance. And through the element of chance, guesswork and luck come to play a great part in war.

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

Chance does not speak essentially through words nor can it be seen in their convolution. It is the eruption of language, its sudden appearance. It's not a night twinkle with stars, an illuminated sleep, nor a drowsy vigil. It is the very edge of consciousness.

Life is a chance, a story is a chance. That I am here is a chance.

Chance never writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; chance never drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will; nor can it be without absurdity supposed able to do them; which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree.

Above all, it's never blind chance: it's a chance that is always planned, but also always surprising. And I need it in order to carry on, in order to eradicate my mistakes, to destroy what I've worked out wrong, to introduce something different and disruptive. I'm often astonished to find how much better chance is than I am.

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.

Character + Chance = Success

Luck happens when opportunity encounters the prepared mind.