Luck Quotes
This page is about fortune in the old sense. Shakespeare leads, followed by Seneca, Livy, La Rochefoucauld and Publilius Syrus. Horace’s Satires have the line that opens the sourced list, an appeal to Fortune as the cruellest of heavenly powers for making game of life. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1776) has vicissitudes of fortune that bury empires and cities in a common grave, and Thomas Gray, in 1761, wrote of a man too poor for a bribe and too proud to importune, who did not have the method of making a fortune.
Three entries are flagged misattributed. “Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when He did not want to sign” is credited to Anatole France, and two passages are credited to Torquato Tasso, one about the fortunate extolling fortune and another comparing a day of fortune to a harvest.
Fortune is gentle to the lowly, and heaven strikes the humble with a light hand.
The shifting hour flies with doubtful wings; nor does swift Fortune keep faith with anyone.
Times go by turns and chances change by course,
From foul to fair, from better hap to worse.
Men's fortunes are on a wheel, which in its turning suffers not the same man to prosper for ever.
Happy art thou, as if every day thou hadst picked up a horseshoe.
He whom fortune has never deceived, rarely considers the uncertainty of human events.
Nothing is more dangerous to men than a sudden change of fortune.
Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune,
He had not the method of making a fortune.