Random Occurrences Quotes

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities.

Here's the thing about luck...you don't know if it's good or bad until you have some perspective.

I have come to understand that life is composed of a series of coincidences. How we react to these - how we exercise what some refer to as free will - is everything; the choices we make within the boundaries of the twists of fate determine who we are.

Men may boast of their great actions; but they are more often the effects of chance than of design.

Anything can happen. Anything happens all the time.

The nature of tragedy and accident is that we cannot predict.

Some make their worlds without knowing it. Their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the Vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed souffles and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are.

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.

It is no great wonder if in long process of time, while fortune takes her course hither and thither, numerous coincidences should spontaneously occur. If the number and variety of subjects to be wrought upon be infinite, it is all the more easy for fortune, with such an abundance of material, to effect this similarity of results.

I have been trying to point out that in our lives chance may have an astonishing influence and, if I may offer advice to the young laboratory worker, it would be this - never to neglect an extraordinary appearance or happening.

But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us.

The point is to stumble upon things in your life, and not plan them out.

Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word. Perhaps our gut feeling that it cannot be so reflects only our hopes and prejudices, our desperate striving to make sense of a complex and confusing world, and not the ways of nature.

There are many accidents that are nothing but accidents-and forget it. But there are some that were brought about only because you are the person you are... you have the wherewithal, intelligence, and energy to recognize it and do something with it.

Everybody's life has these moments, where one thing leads to another. Some are big and obvious and some are small and seemingly insignificant.

This tremendous friction which cannot, as in mechanics, be reduced to a few points, is everywhere in contact with chance, and brings about effects that cannot be measured just because they are largely due to chance.

[If] there is mercy in nature, it is accidental. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.

Everybody believes in chance.

They're funny things, Accidents. You never have them till you're having them.

And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.

Things happen to you they happen. They dont ask first. They dont require your permission.

Things don't happen because they're bad or good, else all eggs would be addled or none at all, and at the most it is but six to the dozen. There's good chances and bad chances, and nobody's luck is pulled only by one string.

So much of life is happenstance. It makes me laugh when I go to a bookstore and see all those titles about controlling your life. You're lucky if you can control your bladder.

Some of the most important determinants of life paths arise through the most trivial of circumstances.

As far as physicians go, chance is more valuable than knowledge.