55 Quotes Tagged: chance

One must never ask of fortune more than she can grant

And thus, by combining the uncertainty of chance with the force of mathematical proof and by the reconciliation of two apparent opposites, she derives her name from both of them and rightfully assumes the wonderful name of Mathematics of Chance!

You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject...

Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire.

The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other... In this moment, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled... A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one, a deranged interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction).

Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty?

Prophecy: Two bull's eyes out of a possible million.

a soldier lives always for the next battle, because he knows that before it arrives impossible changes can occur in his favor.

It is never worth while to absolutely exhaust one's self or to take big chances unless for an adequate object.

The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.

So much of what happens by chance forms what becomes your life.

It is not cowardice but courage to acknowledge the superior role chance plays in steering the course of life, and at the same time to take responsibility for the margin of difference our personal choices do make within the parameters of chance.

How many times we must have met
Here on the street as strangers do,
Children of chance we were, who passed
The door of heaven and never knew.

"I have been enormously impressed by the role that pure chance plays in determining our life history. I was reminded of some famous lines of Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
I took the one less travled by,
And that has made all the difference.

As I recalled my own experience and development, I was impressed by the series of lucky accidents that determined the road I traveled.

> From "Lives of the Laureates" pg.67"

how can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact opposites?

Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day.

Why is it that showers and even storms seem to come by chance, so that many people think it quite natural to pray for rain or fine weather, though they would consider it ridiculous to ask for an eclipse by prayer?