“It was just good luck, last minute luck.”
“Your ‘luck’ was mostly sweat and intuition.”
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.
Against ill chances men are ever merry;
But heaviness foreruns the good event.
Fortune turns all things to the advantage of those on whom she smiles.
When Fortune means to men most good,
She looks upon them with a threatening eye.
How often things occur by mere chance, which we dared not even to hope for.
He talks nonsense; to a sensible man there is no such thing as chance.
Fortune never seems so blind as to those upon whom she confers no favors.
The most wretched fortune is safe; for there is no fear of anything worse.
Fortune moulds and circumscribes human affairs as she pleases.
Man's fortune is usually changed at once; life is changeable.