Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Chance

"If matter and energy and chance are all there is, it takes a man of most unusual courage to build an unselfish love for humanity on such foundations." - Edmund Ware Sinnot

"We may conclude that the claim `Either there is a plan or else the existence of life is pure chance’ presents a false dichotomy. We’re not trapped into having to agree either with Teilhard or Monod. We can disagree with both." - Garrett Thomson

"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." -

"The willingness to take the risk of being wrong and perhaps subjected to ridicule, punishment, or loss is an outstanding trait of the creative person. Such action does not mean to behave on foolish impulse, but to calculate the risks and then to take a chance." - Frank Barron

"Imagining yourself at your own funeral allows you to look back at your life while you still have the chance to make some important changes." - Richard Carlson

"Being aware of what your mind thinks, believes, and remembers gives you the chance to change your reality. As on the inside, so on the outside." - David Dibble

"A problem is a chance for you to do your best." -

"The important thing is not being afraid to take a chance. Remember, the greatest failure is to not try. Once you find something you love to do, be the best at doing it." - Debbi Fields

"Humans have the ability to act consciously, and collectively, [exercising foresight to] choose their own evolutionary path. In our crucial epoch we cannot leave the selection of the next step in the evolution of human society and culture to chance. We must plan for it, consciously and purposefully." -

"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

"Anyone can become part of the critical mass that offers us a chance of improving the world before it is too late. You can rethink your goals and question what you are doing with your life. If your present way of living does not stand up against an impartial standard of value, then you can change it." - Peter Singer

"Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence." - Abigail Adams

"Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence." -

"Learning is not attained by chance. It must be sought for with ardor and attended with diligence." -

"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst." - Albert Camus

"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better." - Albert Camus

"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst." -

"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better." -

"The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors." - Alfred North Whitehead

"Chance is perhaps God's pseudonym when he does not want to sign." -

"You should remember that though another may have more money, beauty, and brains than you, when it comes to the rarer spiritual values such as charity, self-sacrifice, honor and nobility of heart, you have an equal chance with everyone to be the most beloved and honored of all people." - Archibald Rutledge

"Chance has no place in that which is natural, and what happens everywhere and in every case is no matter of chance." - Aristotle NULL

"Every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger or appetite." - Aristotle NULL

"Every result of chance is from what is spontaneous, but not everything that is from what is spontaneous is from chance." - Aristotle NULL

"Every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite." - Aristotle NULL

"All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire." - Aristotle NULL

"Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you'll understand what little chance you have trying to change others." -

"According to the true nature of things, everyone has all the sufferings of the world as his own; indeed, he has to look upon all merely possible sufferings as actual for him, so long as he is the firm and constant will-to-live, in other words, affirms life with all his strength. For the knowledge that sees through the principium individuationis, a happy life in time, given by chance or won from it by shrewdness, amid the sufferings of innumerable others, is only a beggar’s dream, in which he is a king, but from which he must awake, in order to realize that only a fleeting illusion had separated him from the suffering of his life." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"The man who has been born into a position of wealth comes to look upon it as something without which he could no more live than he could live without air; he guards it as he does his very life; and so he is generally a lover of order, prudent and economical. But the man who has been born into a poor position looks upon it as the natural one, and if by any chance he comes in for a fortune, he regards it as a superfluity, something to be enjoyed or wasted, because, if it comes to an end, he can get on just as well as before, with one anxiety the less." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"One of the striking characteristics of successful persons is their faculty of determining the relative importance of different things. There are many things which it is more desirable to do, a few are essential, and there is no more useful quality of the human mind than that which enables its possessor at once to distinguish which the few essential things are... Let one adopt the practice of reflecting, every morning, what must necessarily be done during the day, and then begin by doing the most important things first, leaving the others to take their chance of being done or left undone." - Author Unknown NULL

"The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything really badly that reason says you have little or no chance of getting." - Author Unknown NULL

"A man’s fate is his own temper; and according to that will be his opinion as to the particular manner in which the course of events is regulated. A consistent man believes in destiny, an capricious man in chance." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"I do not believe such a quality as chance exists. Every incident that happens must be a link in a chain." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"A consistent man believes in destiny, a capricious man in chance." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"Freedom means chance; you are free, because there is no reason which will account for your particular acts, because no one in the world, not even yourself, can possibly say what you will, or will not, do next. You are ‘accountable’, in short, because you are a wholly ‘unaccountable’ creature." - Bernard Bosanquet

"In an age remarkable for good reasoning and bad conduct, for sound rules and corrupt manners, when virtue fills our heads, but vice our hearts; when those who would fain persuade us that they are quite sure of heaven, appear in no greater hurry to go there than other folks, but put on the livery of the best master only to serve the worst; in an age when modesty herself is more ashamed of detection than delinquency; when independence of principle consists in having no principle on which to depend; and free thinking, not in thinking freely, but in being free from thinking; in an age when patriots will hold anything except their tongues; keep anything except their word; and lose nothing patiently except their character; to improve such an age must be difficult; to instruct it dangerous; and he stands no chance of amending it who cannot at the same time amuse it." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Subtract from the great man all that he owes to opportunity, all that he owes to chance, and all that he gained by the wisdom of his friends and the folly of his enemies, and the giant will often be seen as a pygmy." - Charles Caleb Colton

"There is no cruelty so inexorable and unrelenting as that which proceeds from a bigoted and presumptuous supposition of doing service to God. The victim of the fanatical persecutor will find that the stronger the motives he can urge for mercy are, the weaker will be his chance for obtaining it, for the merit of his destruction will be supposed to rise in value in proportion as it is effected at the expense of every feeling both of justice and of humanity." - Charles Caleb Colton

"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." - Charles Caleb Colton

"If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian, he can live in peace. Treat all men alike. Give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases." - Chief Joseph, born Hinmuuttu-yalatlat

"Treat all men alike. Give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it...Whenever the white man treats the Indian as they treat each other, then we will have no more wars. We shall all be alike - brothers of one father and one mother, with only the sky above us and one country around us, and one government for all." - Chief Joseph, born Hinmuuttu-yalatlat

"Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes further is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The "sure thing" boat never gets far from shore." - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey

"Whatever gave you the idea that fear was some kind of reason not to do something?... The only time you have a chance to show courage is when you're afraid." - Dan Millman, born Daniel Jay Millman

"Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are not so often the result of great design as of chance." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"He is not a reasonable man who by chance stumbles upon reason, but he who derives it from knowledge, from discernment, and from taste." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"Any man who has a job has a chance." - Elbert Green Hubbard

"Luck is not chance – it’s toil – fortune’s expensive smile is earned." - Emily Dickinson, fully Emily Elizabeth Dickinson

"In the overwhelming majority of phenomena whose regularity and invariability have led to the formulation of the postulate of causality, the common element underlying the consistency observed - is chance." -

"Chance fights ever on the side of the prudent." -