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chance quotes

  • No girls, no legs, no jokes, no chance.

    -Anonymous
      Review of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! wired to theatre critic Walter Winchell by one of his informants after its pre-Broadway tryout in New Haven. Quoted in Peter Hay Broadway  Anecdotes (1989).

  • Yet they, believe me, who await No gifts from chance, have conquered fate.

    - Matthew Arnold
      The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems,'Resignation', l.247^8.

  • Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.

    -Jane Austen
      Pride and Prejudice, ch.6.

  • I returned, and saw under the sun, that 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 favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    Ecclesiastes 9:11

  • All my hope on God is founded He does still my trust renew, Me through change and chance he guideth, Only good and only true. God unknown, He alone Calls my heart to be his own.

    - Robert Seymour Bridges
      Hymn.

  • Even an attorney of modest talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game ofchance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.

    -Truman Capote
      In Cold Blood, ch.4.

  •    Fair stood the wind for France When we our sails advance, Nor now to prove our chance Longer will tarry.

    - Michael Drayton
      Poems Lyrick and Pastorall,'To the Cambro-Britons and Their Harp, His Ballad of  Agincourt', describing Henry V's expedition to France,1415.

  • Revolving in his altered soul The various turns of chance below.

    -John Dryden
      Alexander's Feast, l.85^6.

  • I might as well play bridge with my old maid aunts I haven't got a chance This is a fine romance.

    - Dorothy Fields
      'A Fine Romance', song featured in the film Swing Time (music by  Jerome Kern).

  • The element of chance†is expelled. Nobody would now waste his time in theorizing about a fortuitous concourse of atoms.We have so far spelled out the history of creation as to see that all has been done in strict accordance with law. The method has been the method of evolution, and the more we study it the more do we discern in it intelligible coherence.

    -John Fiske
      Through Nature to God.

  • Inside this Hollywood playboy is a someway decent actor waiting for a chance to prove it. But, since Hollywood will never give me that chance, I drink to

    - Dario Fo
    controversial plays  and revues  deal with political  themes.  His plays   include  Accidental   Death   of   an   Anarchist   (1970)   and Trumpets  and  Raspberries  (1984).  He  was  awarded  the  Nobel prize for literature in1997.

  • The price that the market sets on the services of our resources is similarlyaffected bya bewildering mixture of chance and choice. Frank Sinatra's voice was highly valued intwentieth-century United States.Would it have been highly valued in twentieth-century India, if he had happened to be born and to live there?

    - Milton Friedman
    Free to Choose (with Rose Friedman).

  • 'A man†ain't got no hasn't got any can't really isn't any way out† One man alone ain't got†no chance.

    - Ernest Millar Hemingway
      Harry Morgan's dying words. To Have and Have Not.

  • In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud: Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody but unbowed.

    -W(illiam) E(rnest) Henley
      'Invictus', collected in In Hospital (1903).

  • No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned† A man in a jail has moreroom, better food, and commonly bettercompany.

    - Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
      Remark,16 Mar. Quoted in  James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), vol.1.

  • A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. A new era is upon us† We have had our last chance. If we do not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.

    - Douglas MacArthur
      National radio broadcast on the surrender of  Japan, 2 Sep.

  • Un coup de de  s n'abolira jamais le hasard. A throw of the dice will never abolish chance.

    - Ste  phane Mallarme 
       Title of poem, in Cosmopolis, May.

  • Chaos umpire sits, And by decision more embroils the fray By which he reigns; next him high arbiter Chance governs all.

    -John Milton
      Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.2, l.681^4.

  • Necessity and chance Approach not me, and what I will is fate.

    -John Milton
      God. Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.7, l.172^3.

  • Dans les champs de l'observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits pre  pare  s. Where observation is concerned, chance favours only the prepared mind.

    - Louis Pasteur
      Speech at the inauguration of the Faculty of Science, University of Lille,7 Dec.

  • I went out to Charing Cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn and quarteredwhich was done therehe looking as cheerfully as any man could do in that condition† Thus it was my chance to see the King beheaded at Whitehall and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the King at Charing Cross.

    - Samuel Pepys
      Diary entry,13 Oct.

  • True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence, The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

    - Alexander Pope
    An Essay on Criticism, l.362^5.

  • All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony, not understood; All partial evil, universal good: And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite, One truth is clear,'Whatever Is, is.'

    - Alexander Pope
    RIGHT1733  An Essay on Man, epistle1, l.289^94.

  • He was a black Irish type, with centuries of rebelliousness behind him, and I decided to chance it.

    -J(ohn) B(oynton) Priestley
    Saturn Over theWater.

  • Pantagrue  lisme†est certaine gaiete   d'esprit confite en me  pris des choses fortuites. Pantagruelism is a certain liveliness of mind made in contempt of chance happenings.

    - Fran c° ois Rabelais
      Quart Livre, Prologue de l'auteur.

  • Idiots are always in favour of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favour of equality.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      The IntelligentWoman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism.

  • Fate,Time,Occasion,Chance, and Change? To these All things are subject but eternal love.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      Prometheus Unbound, act 2, sc.4, l.119^20.

  • The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man Passionless?no, yet free from guilt or pain, Which were, for his will made or suffered them, Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves, From chance, and death, and mutability, The clogs of that which else might oversoar The loftiest star of unascended heaven, Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      Prometheus Unbound, act 3, sc.4, l.193^204.

  • Dost thou look back on what hath been, As some divinely gifted man, Whose life in low estate began And on a simple village green; Who breaks his birth's invidious bar, And grasps the skirts of happy chance, And breasts the blows of circumstance, And grapples with his evil star.

    -Tennyson
      In Memoriam A.H.H., canto 64, l.1^8.

  • Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

    - Henry David Thoreau
      AWeek on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,'Sunday'.

  • 'Alf Todd,'said Ukridge, soaring to an impressive burst of imagery,'has about as much chance as a one-armed blind man in a dark room trying to shove a pound of melted butter into a wild cat's left ear with a red-hot needle.'

    -Plum
      Ukridge, ch.5.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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