Chance is a dicer. [ Proverb ]
Chance governs all. [ Milton ]
Chance is a second master. [ Pliny the Elder ]
Such is the chance of war. [ Homer ]
Wise men may chance to be caught. [ Proverb ]
Wisdom comes to no one by chance. [ Seneca ]
There is chance in a cock's spur. [ Proverb ]
As the ancients wisely say
Have a care o' the main chance,
And look before you ere you leap;
For as you sow you are like to reap. [ Butler ]
Chance generally favors the prudent. [ Joubert ]
Chance is a nickname for Providence. [ Chamfort ]
And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
And breasts the blows of circumstance. [ Tennyson ]
I shall show the cinders of my spirits
Through the ashes of my chance. [ William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra. Act V. Sc. 2 ]
Time and chance happeneth to them all. [ Bible ]
Wisdom and fortune combating together,
If that the former dare but what it can,
No chance may shake it. [ William Shakespeare ]
Chance is the providence of adventurers. [ Napoleon ]
An enemy may chance to give good counsel. [ Proverb ]
Never lose a chance of saying a kind word. [ William M. Thackeray ]
A wise man turns chance into good fortune. [ Proverb ]
Too late to grieve when the chance is past. [ Proverb ]
The bravest men are subject most to chance. [ Dryden ]
A fool may now and then be right by chance. [ Cowper ]
So weary with disasters tugged with fortune.
That I would set my life on any chance,
To mend, or be rid of it. [ William Shakespeare ]
He that gallops his horse on Blackstone edge
May chance to catch a fall. [ Old song ]
Chance will not do the work -
Chance sends the breeze;
But if the pilot slumber at the helm.
The very wind that wafts us towards the port
May dash us on the shelves.
The steersman's part is vigilance.
Blow it or rough or smooth. [ Sir Walter Scott ]
An ape may chance to sit amongst the Doctors. [ Proverb ]
How slight a chance may raise or sink a soul! [ Bailey ]
All Nature is but art unknown to thee;
All chance direction, which thou canst not see. [ Pope ]
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. [ William Shakespeare ]
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance. [ Pope ]
Life with all it yields of joy and woe,
And hope and fear,
Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love,
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is. [ Browning ]
Chance is blind and is the sole author of creation. [ Saintine ]
Love is the offspring of chance: its nurse is habit. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
Chance never helps those who do not help themselves. [ Sophocles ]
Can that which is not shape, shape the things that are?
Is chance omnipotent - resolve me why
The meanest shellfish, and the noblest brute,
Transmit their likeness to the years that come? [ Dilnot Sladden ]
Chance makes our parents, but choice makes our friends. [ Delille ]
There is no game of chance more hazardous than marriage. [ J. David ]
Every hour of lost time is a chance of future misfortune. [ Napoleon I ]
A merchant's happiness hangs upon chance, winds and waves. [ Proverb ]
A fool may chance to put something into a wise man's head. [ Proverb ]
Necessity and chance approach not me, and what I will is fate. [ Milton ]
Paganism attributes the creation of the world to blind chance. [ Richard Baxter ]
It is chance that makes brothers, but hearts that make friends.
A consistent man believes in destiny, a capricious man in chance. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]
Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause. [ Voltaire ]
Chance often gives us that which we should not have presumed to ask. [ Lamartine ]
Discouragement seizes us only when we can no longer count on chance. [ George Sand ]
Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned. [ Samuel Johnson ]
It is chance that gives us relations, but we give friends to ourselves. [ Delille ]
I have set my life upon a cast, and I will stand the hazard of the die. [ Shakespeare ]
Chance happens to all, but to turn chance to account is the gift of few. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]
Most men are like plants: they possess properties which chance discovers. [ De Saint-Real ]
The opposites of apparent chance are constancy and sensible interposition. [ Paley ]
Chance corrects us of many faults that reason would not know how to correct. [ La Roche ]
Chance is a kind of god. for it preserves many things which we do not observe. [ Menander ]
The mines of knowledge are oft laid bare through the forked hazel wand of chance. [ Tupper ]
Don't drive at a fellow-creature, so long as there is a reasonable chance of hitting him. [ W. E. Norris ]
The generality of men have, like plants, latent properties, which chance brings to light. [ Rochefoucauld ]
Nature goes her own way, and all that to us seems an exception, is really according to order. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
I consider him of no account who esteems himself just as the popular breath may chance to raise him. [ Goethe ]
How often events, by chance and unexpectedly, come to pass, which you had not dared even to hope for! [ Terence ]
There is no doubt such a thing as chance, but I see no reason why Providence should not make use of it. [ Simms ]
Chance suggests thoughts; changes deprive us of them: there is no rule for preserving or acquiring them. [ Pascal ]
I do not believe such a quality as chance exists. Every incident that happens must be a link in a chain. [ Beaconsfield ]
To talk of luck and chance only shows how little we really know of the laws which govern cause and effect. [ Hosea Ballou ]
Be glad of life, because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars. [ Henry van Dyke ]
Many shining actions owe their success to chance, though the general or statesman runs away with the applause. [ Lord Karnes ]
Favourable chance is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. [ George Eliot ]
Give me a chance, says Stupid, and I will show you. Ten to one he has had his chance already, and neglected it. [ Haliburton ]
He who trusts all things to chance makes a lottery of his life. He who wants content cannot find an easy chair. [ Proverb ]
Chance is always powerful; let your hook always be cast. In a pool where you least expect it there will be a fish. [ Ovid ]
There is no such thing as chance; and what seems to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
Time is, after all, the greatest of poets; and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs of Fame. [ Lowell ]
Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are not so often the result of a great design as of chance. [ La Rochefoucauld ]
It is no less merit to keep what you have got than to gain it. In the one there is chance; the other will be a work of art. [ Ovid ]
Chance is but a mere name, and really nothing in itself; a conception of our minds, and only a compendious way of speaking. [ Bentley ]
Games of chance are traps to catch schoolboy novices and gaping country squires, who begin with a guinea and end with a mortgage. [ Cumberland ]
Chance is but the pseudonym of God for those particular cases which He does not choose to subscribe openly with His own sign-manual. [ Coleridge ]
To have any chance of lasting, a book must satisfy, not merely some fleeting fancy of the day, but a constant longing and hunger of human nature. [ Lowell ]
To admit that there is any such thing as chance, in the common acceptation of the term, would be to attempt to establish a power independent of God. [ Colton ]
Literature, as a field for glory, is an arena where a tomb may be more easily found than laurels; as a means of support, it is the very chance of chances. [ H. Giles ]
Luck is ever waiting for something to turn up. Labour, with keen eyes and strong will, will turn up something. Luck relies on chance, labour on character. [ Cobden ]
There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently, however they have writ the style of gods, and make a pish at chance and sufferance. [ William Shakespeare ]
The best men are not those who have waited for chances, but who have taken them, besieged the chance, conquered the chance, and made the chance their servitor. [ Chapin ]
The chance meeting, the unplanned outing, and the unexpected diversion that so often come unsought in the passing days, afford the common channels of happiness. [ Henry D. Chapin ]
There must be chance in the midst of design; by which we mean that events which are not designed necessarily arise from the pursuit of events which are designed. [ Paley ]
What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster! [ Jeremy Taylor ]
He seldom lives frugally who lives by chance. Hope is always liberal, and they that trust her promises make little scruple of revelling today on the profits of tomorrow. [ Johnson ]
A nickname a man may chance to wear out; but a system of calumny, pursued by a faction, may descend even to posterity. This principle has taken full effect on this state favorite. [ Isaac Disraeli ]
To guide scoundrels by love is a method that will not hold together; hardly for the flower of men will love do; and for the sediment and scoundrelism of them it has not even a chance to do. [ Carlyle ]
The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. [ Bible ]
Be not too presumptuously sure in any business; for things of this world depend upon such a train of unseen chances that if it were in man's hands to set the tables, yet is he not certain to win the game. [ George Herbert ]
There are many arts among men, the knowledge of which is acquired bit by bit by experience. For it is experience that causes our life to move forward by the skill we acquire, while want of experience subjects us to the effects of chance. [ Plato ]
Nature's noblemen are everywhere, - in town and out of town, gloved and rough-handed, rich and poor. Prejudice against a lord, because he is a lord, is losing the chance of finding a good fellow, as much as prejudice against a ploughman because he is a ploughman. [ Willis ]
Chance is a term we apply to events to denote that they happen without any necessary or foreknown cause. When we say a thing happens by chance, we mean no more than that its cause is unknown to us, and not, as some vainly imagine, that chance itself can be the cause of anything. [ C. Buck ]
A man who cannot win fame in his own age will have a very small chance of winning it from posterity. True, there are some half-dozen exceptions to this truth among millions of myriads that attest it; but what man of commonsense would invest any large amount of hope in so unpromising a lottery? [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
If our eloquence be directed above the heads of our hearers, we shall do no execution. By pointing our arguments low, we stand a chance of hitting their hearts as well as their heads. In addressing angels, we could hardly raise our eloquence too high; but we must remember that men are not angels. [ Colton ]
It is strictly and philosophically true in Nature and reason that there is no such thing as chance or accident; it being evident that these words do not signify anything really existing, anything that is truly an agent or the cause of any event; but they signify merely men's ignorance of the real and immediate cause. [ Adam Clarke ]
Oh, my dear friends, - you who are letting miserable misunderstandings run on from year to year, meaning to clear them up some day, - if you only could know and see and feel that the time is short, how it would break the spell! How you would go instantly and do the thing which you might never have another chance to do! [ Phillips Brooks ]
Wise men, for the most part, are silent at present, and good men powerless; the senseless vociferate, and the heartless govern; while all social law and providence are dissolved by the enraged agitation of a multitude, among whom every villain has a chance of power, every simpleton of praise, and every scoundrel of fortune. [ John Ruskin ]
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. [ Barrow ]
The only difference between a genius and one of common capacity is that the former anticipates and explores what the latter accidentally hits upon. But even the man of genius himself more frequently employs the advantages that chance presents to him. It is the lapidary that gives value to the diamond, which the peasant has dug up without knowing its worth. [ Abbe Raynal ]
Luck is ever waiting for something to turn up. Labor, with keen eyes and strong will, will turn up something. Luck lies in bed, and wishes the postman would bring him the news of a legacy. Labor turns out at six o'clock, and with busy pen or ringing hammer lays the foundation of a competence. Luck whines. Labor whistles. Luck relies on chance. Labor on character. [ Cobden ]
Surely no man can reflect, without wonder, upon the vicissitudes of human life arising from causes in the highest degree accidental and trifling. If you trace the necessary concatenation of human events a very little way back, you may perhaps discover that a person's very going in or out of a door has been the means of coloring with misery or happiness the remaining current of his life. [ Lord Greville ]
We acquire the love of people who, being in our proximity, are presumed to know us; and we receive reputation or celebrity, from such as are not personally acquainted with us. Merit secures to us the regard of our honest neighbors, and good fortune that of the public. Esteem is the harvest of a whole life spent in usefulness; but reputation is often bestowed upon a chance action, and depends most on success. [ G. A. Sala ]
Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them. Everyone must be challenged. A day dawns, quite like other days; in it a single hour comes, quite like other hours; but in that day and in that hour the chance of a lifetime faces us. To face every opportunity of life thoughtfully and ask its meaning bravely and earnestly, is the only way to meet the supreme opportunities when they come, whether open-faced or disguised. [ Maltbie Babcock ]
There are chords in the human heart - strange varying strings - which are only struck by accident; which will remain mute and senseless to appeals the most passionate and earnest, and respond at last to the slightest casual touch. In the most insensible or childish minds there is some train of reflection which art can seldom lead or skill assist, but which will reveal itself, as great truths have done, by chance, and when the discoverer has the plainest and simplest end in view. [ Dickens ]
Nature seems to delight in disappointing the assiduities of art, with which it would rear dulness to maturity, and to glory in the vigor and luxuriance of her chance productions. She scatters the seeds of genius to the winds, and though some may perish among the stony places of the world, and some may be choked by the thorns and brambles of early adversity, yet others will now and then strike root even in the clefts of the rock, struggle bravely up into sunshine, and spread over their sterile birthplace all the beauties of vegetation. [ Washington Irving ]
The man who makes a success of an important venture never waits for the crowd. He strikes out for himself. It takes nerve, it takes a great lot of grit; but the man that succeeds has both. Anyone can fail. The public admires the man who has enough confidence in himself to take a chance. These chances are the main things after all. The man who tries to succeed must expect to be criticised. Nothing important was ever done but the greater number consulted previously doubted the possibility. Success is the accomplishment of that which most people think can't be done. [ C. V. White ]
He must have an artist's eye for color and form who can arrange a hundred flowers as tastefully, in any other way, as by strolling through a garden, and picking here one and there one, and adding them to the bouquet in the accidental order in which they chance to come. Thus we see every summer day the fair lady coming in from the breezy side hill with gorgeous colors and most witching effects. If only she could be changed to alabaster, was ever a finer show of flowers in so fine a vase? But instead of allowing the flowers to remain as they were gathered, they are laid upon the table, divided, rearranged on some principle of taste, I know not what, but never again have that charming naturalness and grace which they first had. [ Beecher ]