This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"In periods of decadence only very independent geniuses have a chance to survive." - Eugène Delacroix, fully Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix
"Architecture paves the way, as it were, for the adequate realization of the God, toiling and wrestling in his service with external nature, and seeking to extricate it from the chaos of finitude, and the abortiveness of chance." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Life is a series of inspired follies. The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day." - George Bernard Shaw
"Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"The doctrine of Chance in the eternal world corresponds to that of Free Will in the internal." - Henry Thomas Buckle
"Chance rule men, and not men chances." - Herodotus NULL
"To talk of luck and chance only shows how little we really know of the laws which govern cause and effect." - Hosea Ballou
"If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
"To diminish envy, let us consider not what others possess, but what they enjoy; mere riches may be the gift of lucky accident or blind chance, but happiness must be the result of prudent preference and rational design; the highest happiness then can have no other foundation than the deepest wisdom; and the happiest fool is only as happy as he knows how to be." - James Bryant Conant
"Give peace a chance." - John Lennon
"Chance governs all." - John Milton
"Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others; on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means but as itself an ideal end. Aiming this at something else, they find happiness by the way... Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life." - John Stuart Mill
"Though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; an since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied." - John Stuart Mill
"Parenting and family life can be a perfect field for mindfulness practice, but it’s not for the weak-hearted, the selfish or lazy, or the hopelessly romantic. Parenting is a mirror that forces you to look at yourself. If you can learn from what you observe you just may have a chance to keep growing yourself." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
"You must remember that nothing happens quite by chance. It’s a question of accretion of information and experience... it’s just chance that I happened to be here at this particular time when there was available and at my disposal the great experience of all the investigators who plodded along for a number of years." - Jonas Salk
"The body is a thing, the soul is also a thing; man is not a thing, but a drama - his life. Man has to live with the body and soul which have fallen to him by chance. And the first thing he has to do is decide what he is going to do." - José Ortega y Gasset
"'You put stock in winning wars, 'the grubby iniquitous old man scoffed. 'The real trick lies in losing wars, and in knowing which wars can be lost. Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how splendidly we've done nonetheless. France wins wars and is in a continual state of crisis. Germany loses and prospers. Look at our own recent history. Italy won a war in Ethiopia and promptly stumbled into serious trouble. Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped start a world war we hadn't a chance of winning. But now that we are losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better, and we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated.'" - Joseph Heller
"Seems to me, it aint the world that's so bad but what we're doin' to it. And all I'm saying is, see, what a wonderful world it would be if only we'd give it a chance. Love baby, love. That's the secret, yeah. If lots more of us loved each other, we'd solve lots more problems. And then this world would be better. That's wha' ol' Pops keeps saying." - Louis Armstrong, nicknamed Satchmo or Pops
"In the field of observation, chance only favors minds which are prepared." - Louis Pasteur
"Fortune favors the prepared mind." - Louis Pasteur
"Did you ever observe to whom the accidents happen? Chance favors only the prepared mind." - Louis Pasteur
"Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind." - Louis Pasteur
"Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them. Every one 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, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"Salvation is the only real success... God’s holiness is expressed in His love. Therefore love is wholeness, and to love is to fulfill - to fill full - God’s law, and be right all round. Learn then to love God and your brother and all things great and small. Life is our “chance of learning love.”" - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"Enmity is anger waiting for a chance for revenge." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"The paradox of rising expectations suggests that improving the quality of life might be an insurmountable task. In fact, there is not inherent problem in our desire to escalate our goals, as long as we enjoy the struggle along the way. The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish." - Ovid, formally Publius Ovidius Naso NULL
"I believe in a spiritual world not as something separate from this world, but as its innermost truth. With the breath we draw, we must feel this truth that we are living in God. Born in this great world, full of the mystery of the infinite, we cannot accept our existence as a momentary outburst of chance, drifting on the current of matter toward an eternal nowhere. We cannot look upon our lives as dreams of a dreamer who has no awakening in all time. We have a personality to which matter and force are unmeaning unless related to something infinitely personal, whose nature we have discovered, in some measure, in human love, in the greatness of the good, in the martyrdom of heroic souls, in the ineffable beauty of nature, which can never be a mere physical fact nor anything but an expression of personality." -
"There is no teaching until the pupil is brought into the same state or principle in which you are; a transfusion takes place; he is you, and you are he; there is a teaching; and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he ever quite love the benefit." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The way we face this factor of chance helps to determine the spirit and quality of our lives. When we count on chance in lieu of preparation and prudence we weaken our characters." - Ralph Washington Sockman
"Chance never helps those who do not help themselves." - Sophocles NULL
"Why should man fear since chance is all in all for him, and he can clearly foreknow nothing? Best to live lightly, as one can, unthinkingly." - Sophocles NULL
"Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"Our own opinion of ourselves should be lower than that formed by others, for we have a better chance at our imperfections." - Thomas Kempis, aka Thomas à Kempis, Thomas von Kempen, Thomas Haemerkken or Hammerlein or Hemerken or Hämerken
"A little gleam of time between two eternities; no second chance to us forever more." - Thomas Carlyle
"Freedom is an open door, but you must walk through it... Freedom is an invitation to be creative... Freedom is the right to be yourself, to make mistakes, to fail and try again. No failure is final; freedom always gives you another chance." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson
"Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieve." - William Jennings Bryan
"Chance is perhaps God's pseudonym when he does not want to sign." - Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault
"All life is a chance. So take it! The person who goes furthest is the one who is willing to do and dare. " - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
"A problem is a chance for you to do your best. " - Duke Ellington, fully Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington
"Are we no greater than the noise we make along one blind atomic pilgrimage whereon by crass chance billeted we go because our brains and bones and cartilage will have it so?" - Edwin Arlington Robinson
"Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them. " - Francesco Guicciardini
"Many people wait throughout their whole lives for the chance to be good in their own fashion." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength in telling the strange story of my experience. I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven — the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it — it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition — make haste — oppress it with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
"Time is not measured by the years that you live but by the deeds that you do and the joy that you give. And each day as it comes brings a chance to each one to love to the fullest, leaving nothing undone that would brighten the life or lighten the load Of some weary traveler lost on Life's Road. So what does it matter how long we may live if as long as we live we unselfishly give." - Helen Steiner Rice
"It takes a great deal of effort to make truth in writing so that the truth as one dreams it may have the best chance of being - not approached, not glimpsed - but better dreamed." - Hélène Cixous