Best 2144 quotes in «chance quotes» category

The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe it just happened by blind chance...the obvious alternative to chance is an Intelligent Designer.

The most essential prediction of Darwinism is that, given an astronomical number of chances, unintelligent processes can make seemingly-designed systems, ones of the complexity of those found in the cell. ID specifically denies this, predicting that in the absence of intelligent input no such systems would develop. So Darwinism and ID make clear, opposite predictions of what we should find when we examine genetic results from a stupendous number of organisms that are under relentless pressure from natural selection. The recent genetic results are a stringent test. The results: 1) Darwinism’s prediction is falsified; 2) Design’s prediction is confirmed.

The point is, the "best" technology or idea doesn't always prevail. Sometimes chance and the law of unintended consequences win out.

The real blessings come without our asking or even knowing what they are.

The most critical risk of all, is not taking the risk if means be dangerous.

the past is so hard to shift. It comes with us like a chaperon, standing between us and the newness of the present - the new chance.

There are indeed many places where I could start. I might start with Rachel's tears, or Priscilla's. There is much shedding of tears in this story. In a complex explanation any order may seem arbitrary. Where after all does anything begin? That three of the four starting points I have mentioned were causally independent of each other suggests speculations, doubtless of the most irrational kind, upon the mystery of human fate.

There are two sacred causes in this world,” he said, holding up his pinkie and ring ringer. “Chance and necessity. By chance I was there to help when you had need.

There is a reason why we met. We don't meet anyone by chance!

There is more chance than choice in our decisions.

There is no harvest without hard work, therefore never expect chance to solve your problems of abject need for you. You must take deliberate actions!

There’s no such thing as probability," she says, slowly, with minimal movement of her jaw. "Things turn out the way they do.

The surgical resident interested in learning trauma will bypass a residency at a quiet community hospital for a residency at a fast-paced Level 1 trauma center treating a high volume of trauma patients. A Level 1 trauma center residency is far more rigorous—and not particularly glamorous—but the intensive culture of a dedicated trauma center will cultivate the decisive judgment and action required of a surgeon specializing in trauma. By choice or by chance, we must actively test our limits to know our capabilities.

The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality. Phlogiston did not even exist, and yet its existence was firmly believed and the theory adhered to rigidly for nearly one hundred years throughout the eighteenth century. ... As experimentation continued the properties of phlogiston became more bizarre and contradictory. But instead of questioning the existence of this mysterious substance it was made to serve more comprehensive purposes. ... For the skeptic or indeed to anyone prepared to step out of the circle of Darwinian belief, it is not hard to find inversions of common sense in modern evolutionary thought which are strikingly reminiscent of the mental gymnastics of the phlogiston chemists or the medieval astronomers. To the skeptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of one thousand volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason. But to the Darwinist the idea is accepted without a ripple of doubt - the paradigm takes precedence!

The thing that's hard about it—the thing that makes it so hard when the person you love has been taken from you, not by something evil you could have seen coming but by random, pure chance—is that you find yourself suddenly living through a history other than the one you expected to live, through no fault of your own. I feel . . . it's hard to describe, but I feel weirdly outside of time. Ever since the accident I've had these moments when I felt like a visiting guest in this world, not a permanent resident. Like sometimes I look in a mirror and I feel like I can almost see through the version of me on the other side of the glass. And sometimes I feel like I can see the history I used to be in more clearly than the history I'm in now—the real history is one where Philip and Sean and I are all together, being a family and doing whatever family things people do, and this one's like . . . like a fake version of events that I've been yanked into, where everything's gone wrong.

The Universe conspires to make people meet each other! We may not realize this but we don't just meet anyone by chance. Everything is connected. We see the signs every moment. We just need to believe in the story of our life!

They don’t know I only speak in runaway train stations and everybody is always a few minutes too late to the platform. No one has ever gotten the chance to get too close because it is never romantic to fuck the girl who makes love to her own sadness every single night.

This is your first and final chance, your one and only biography.

This summer, I'm going to do what Emma said, and let loose. I'll let fate decide—one coin flip at a time.

Through being fired I was given the perfect circumstances to finally answer my calling and live my dream, and I remain grateful to this day for that television network firing me. Without them, I would have refused the call to follow my dream, and I would have missed living the most exciting and fulfilling journey of my life.

There are no dead ends. There is always a trail; sometimes they are just harder to find.

There had never been any more between us than chance had brought. But perhaps that makes a greater indebtedness and binds closer than much else

There is magic in this sad, hard world. A magic stronger than fate, stronger than chance. And it is seen in the unlikeliest of places....It lives inside every human being ready to redeem us. To transform us. To save us. If we can only find the courage to listen to it. It is the magic of the human heart.

There is no path to the future, Fitz. The path is now. Now is all there is, or ever will be. You can change perhaps the next breaths in your life. But after that, random chance seizes you in its jaws again. A tree falls on you, a spider bites your ankle, and all your grand plans for winning a battle are for naught. Now is what we have, Fitz, and now is where we act to stay alive.

There will never be another day such as this one, with all the variables of life combining in such a way to form this opportunity. So don't let it go, grab it.

These were young people having their fun. Old age comes quickly. If you don’t enjoy life at that time, you will never get another chance. At our age you only get afflictions.

The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.

The world can accommodate your situation, as it accommodates all situations. And your body will keep explaining to you how it all works, this original experiment, this lifelong gift. Your body will keep describing how, for the first time being at least, there is no escape from this particular vessel. These are your atoms. This is your consciousness. These are your experiences--your successes and mistakes. This is your first and final chance, your one and only biography. This is the existential container, the bowl of your life's soup, wherein something can be made sense of, wherein there is a cure, wherein you are.

The world is governed by chance. Randomness stalks us every day of our lives.

The worm’s bad luck is the bird’s good fortune.

They had been talking about his friend Z. when she announced, "If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly have fallen in love with him." Even then, her words had left Tomas in a strange state of melancholy, and now he realized it was only a matter of chance that Tereza loved him and not his friend Z. Apart from her consummated love for Tomas, there were, in the realm of pos­sibility, an infinite number of unconsummated loves for other men. We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspir­ing, is playing the "Es muss sein!" to our own great love. Tomas often thought of Tereza's remark about his friend Z. and came to the conclusion that the love story of his life exemplified not "Es muss sein!" (It must be so), but rather "Es konnte auch anders sein" (It could just as well be otherwise).

This is our thing now, right? Letting chance decide?

Time does not give chances

Tis no wonder, says one of the ancients, that chance has so great a dominion over us, since it is by chance we live.

To believe in luck, you must believe that the universe is a roulette wheel and that instead of paying out to us what we have earned, it pays out only what it wishes. But it is not a spinning wheel of chance, it is a work of art, complete and framed by eternity.

Today is an ephemeral ghost... A strange amazing day that comes only once every four years. For the rest of the time it does not "exist." In mundane terms, it marks a "leap" in time, when the calendar is adjusted to make up for extra seconds accumulated over the preceding three years due to the rotation of the earth. A day of temporal tune up! But this day holds another secret—it contains one of those truly rare moments of delightful transience and light uncertainty that only exist on the razor edge of things, along a buzzing plane of quantum probability... A day of unlocked potential. Will you or won't you? Should you or shouldn't you? Use this day to do something daring, extraordinary and unlike yourself. Take a chance and shape a different pattern in your personal cloud of probability!

To live, to TRULY live, we must be willing to RISK. To be nothing in order to find everything. To leap before we look.

To see something different gives you a chance to be something different!

To the ordinary, opposite, means hatred. Every person sees themselves as love. To the extraordinary, opposite means opportunity.

Waiting insistently in front of a tightly closed door is unfair to all of the open doors! Give a chance to the open doors!

We don't meet anyone by chance.

We have all heard of these things before. The love letter arriving as the teacup falls. The guitar striking up as the last breath sounds out. I don't attribute it to God or to sentiment. Perhaps it's a chance. Or perhaps chance is just another way to try to convince ourselves that we are valuable.

We live in a universe driven by chance,” his father had said once, “but the bullshit artists all want causality.

We must always offer another chance to humans, but not to human animals.

We need to remember not to give the devil a chance and fall away from God’s grace

We only regret the chances we didn't take

We ought to give each other, a chance to change.

We take the elevator to the third floor, to the office of Dr. Harrison Chance. His name alone has put me off. Why not Dr. Victor?

Time says “Let there be” every moment and instantly there is space and the radiance of each bright galaxy. And eyes beholding radiance. And the gnats’ flickering dance. And the seas’ expanse. And death, and chance.

To be happy, without any condition, you should seek the roots of the happiness in internal factors -- unconditional happiness means to practice this phenomenon without any spatio-temporal dependency, that is, everywhere and everytime. Unlike external factors, which determine the conditional happiness in a particular spatio-temporal continuum, and which is out of personal control in such a way that a small difference in such a continuum could influence your sense of happiness, internal factors are more likely to be controlled by you, at least to some extent, therefore, are promising a chance to arrange your happiness yourself without any dependence on someone else.