This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"On its highest level man's contemporary desire to escape responsibility expresses itself not in emphasis on luck, or in emotional submission to fate, but in a thoroughgoing deterministic theory, ascribing all personal qualities to heredity and environment." - Harry Emerson Fosdick
"Diligence is the mother of good luck, and God gives all thins to industry. Then plough deep while sluggards sleep, and you shall have corn to sell and to keep." - Benjamin Franklin
"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." - Darrell K. Royal
"This world is run with far too tight a rein for luck to interfere. Fortune sells her wares; she never gives them. In some form or another, we pay for her favors; or we go away empty." - Amelia Barr, fully Amelia Edith Barr Huddleston
"It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For it, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree." - Charles Pierre Baudelaire
"The fact remains that the overwhelming majority of people who have become wealthy have become so thanks to work they found profoundly absorbing. The long term study of people who eventually became wealthy clearly reveals that their "luck" arose from accidental dedication they had to an arena they enjoyed." - Srully Blotnick
"Hope nothing from luck, and probability is that you will be so prepared, forewarned, and forearmed, that all shallow observers will call you lucky." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"There is no such thing as luck. It's a fancy name for being always at our duty, and so sure to be ready when good time comes." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"Be ready when opportunity comes. Luck is the time when preparation and opportunity meet." - Roy D. Chapin, Jr., fully Roy Dikeman Chapin, Jr.
"What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities, of having a patient, but restless mind, of sacrificing one's ease or vanity, of uniting a love of detail to foresight, and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully." - Victor Cherbuliez
"Luck relies on chance. Labor on character." - Richard Cobden
"I am a great believer in Luck. The harder I work the more of it I seem to have." - Coleman Cox
"Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid." - John Dewey
"Most of us regard good luck as our right, and bad luck as a betrayal of that right." - William Feather
"The only sure thing about luck is that it will change." - Wilson Mizner
"Luck is the residue of design." - Wesley Branch Rickey
"I think luck is the sense to recognize an opportunity and the ability to take advantage of it. Everyone has bad breaks, but everyone also has opportunities. The man who can smile at his breaks and grab his chances gets on." - Samuel Goldwyn
"Never underestimate luck – good or bad." - Allan J Hamilton
"Diligence is the Mother of Good luck." - Benjamin Franklin
"The golden opportunity you are seeking is in yourself. It is not in your environment; it is not in luck or chance, or the help of other; it is in yourself alone." - Orison Swett Marden
"It will generally be found that men who are constantly lamenting their ill luck are only reaping the consequences of their own neglect, mismanagement, and improvidence, or want of application" - Samuel Smiles
"Select the lucky and avoid the unlucky. Ill-luck is generally the penalty of folly, and there is no disease so contagious." - Baltasar Gracián
"When ill luck besets us, to ease the tension we have only to remember that happiness is relative. The next time you are tempted to grumble about what has happened to you, why not pause and be glad that it is no worse than it is." - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
"Some people are so fond of ill luck that they will run halfway to meet it." - Douglas William Jerrold
"Luck is not chance – it’s toil – fortune’s expensive smile is earned." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
"It's hard to detect good luck - it looks so much like something you've earned." - Frank A. Clark
"The whole record of civilization is a record of the failure of money as a higher incentive. The enormous majority of men never make any serious effort to get rich. The few who are sordid enough to do so easily become millionaires with a little luck, and astonish the others by the contrast between their riches and their stupidity... The belief in money as an incentive is founded on the observation that people will do for money what they will not do for anything else." - George Bernard Shaw
"To talk of luck and chance only shows how little we really know of the laws which govern cause and effect." - Hosea Ballou
"A good character, good habits, and iron industry are impregnable to the assaults of all the ill-luck that fools ever dreamed of." - Joseph Addison
"I never knew a early-rising, hard-working, prudent man, careful of his earnings, and strictly honest, who complained of bad luck. A good character, good habits, and iron industry are impregnable to the assaults of all the ill-luck that fools ever dreamed of." - Joseph Addison
"Trusting to luck is only another name for trusting to laziness." - Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek
"The worst cynicism: a belief in luck." - Joyce Carol Oates
"It is better to trust in courage than luck." - Latin Proverbs
"No luck is so good that you can't find some complaint." - Latin Proverbs
"If we always helped one another, none would need luck." - Menander, aka Menander of Athens NULL
"If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some false friends and true enemies; succeed anyway. If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous; be happy anyway. The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; do good anyway… You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God; it was never between you and them anyway." - Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu NULL
"Although most of us probably attribute our problems to other people or to bad luck or to the circumstances around us, the truth is that we create our own success or failure." - Norman Vincent Peale
"Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: it was somebody’s name, or he happened to be there at the time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect. The man was born to do it, and his father was born to be the father of him and for this deed, and, by looking narrowly, you shall see there was no luck in the matter, but it was all a problem in arithmetic, or an experiment in chemistry." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"All successful men have agreed in one thing - they were caustionists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law; that there was not a weak or cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances, Strong men believe in cause and effect." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Ultimately, this is what you go before God for: You’ve had bad luck and good luck and all you really want in the end is mercy." - Robert Frost
"If you haven't been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it's much harder. You need more luck." - Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
"Wit is not only the luck of labour, but also the dexterity of thought." - William Davenant, fully Sir William Davenant, also spelled D'Avenant
"Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck. " - Frank Herbert, formally Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr.