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Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when He did not want to sign.
ANATOLE FRANCE, The Garden of Epicurus
It is safer to accept any chance that offers itself, and extemporize a procedure to fit it, than to get a good plan matured, and wait for a chance of using it.
THOMAS HARDY, Far from the Madding Crowd
- Yet they, believe me, who await
- No gifts from Chance, have conquer'd Fate.
MATTHEW ARNOLD, Resignation
The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance ... logic can be happily tossed out the window.
If God resides anywhere ... surely he shelters behind barricades of pure chance.
SIMON MAWER, The Gospel of Judas
- Chance is a kind of religion
- Where you're damned for plain hard luck.
U2, "The Playboy Mansion"
The successful man is one who had the chance and took it.
ROBER BABSON, attributed, Distilled Wisdom
What is called chance is the instrument of Providence and the secret agent that counteracts what men call wisdom, and preserves order and regularity, and continuation in the whole, for ... I firmly believe, notwithstanding all our complaints, that almost every person upon earth tastes upon the totality more happiness than misery; and therefore if we could correct the world to our fancies, and with the best intentions imaginable, probably we should only produce more misery and confusion.
HORACE WALPOLE, letter, Jan. 19, 1777
The best men are not those who have waited for chances, but taken them--besieged the chance, conquered the chance, and made the chance their servitor.
E. H. CHAPIN, Living Words
Bad chances were better than no chances.
STEPHEN KING, Under the Dome
Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.
CORMAC MCCARTHY, Blood Meridian
We ought never to trust to chance but when we cannot find a better surety.
NORMAN MACDONALD, Maxims and Moral Reflections
Chance seems to us then a good and useful thing, for we discern in it as it were the rudiments of organisation, of an attempt to arrange our lives; and it makes it easy, inevitable, and sometimes -- after interruptions that have made us hope that we may cease to remember -- painful for us to retain in our minds images for the possession of which we shall come in time to believe that we were predestined, and which but for chance we should from the very first have managed to forget, like so many others, so easily.
MARCEL PROUST, Within a Budding Grove
I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.
KURT VONNEGUT, The Sirens of Titan
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