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.
Ours is no sapling, chance-sown by the fountain,
Blooming at Beltane, in winter to fade.
Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.
Fortune knows,
We scorn her most, when most she offers blows.
That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger
To sound what stop she please.
Neuer thinke you fortune can beare the sway,
Where Virtue's force, can cause her to obay.
The fashions of human affairs are brief and changeable, and fortune never remains long indulgent.
A lucky chance, that oft decides the fate
Of mighty monarchs.
Chance and chance alone has a message for us... Only chance can speak to us.
They make their fortune who are stout and wise,
Wit rules the heavens, discretion guides the skies.