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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.

Random quote on Luck

Most quoted on luck:

But as the unthought-on accident is guilty
To what we wildly do, so we profess
Ourselves to be the slaves of chance, and flies
Of every wind that blows.

William Shakespeare

"Then here goes another," says he, "to make sure,
For there's luck in odd numbers," says Rory O'More.

Samuel Lover

Randomness, chaos, uncertainty, and chance are all a part of our lives. They reside at the ill-defined boundaries between what we know, what we can know, and what is beyond our knowing. They make life interesting.

Ivars Peterson The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997)

“I trust to luck to get me by. Luck and destiny.” His eyes were bright with reflected moonlight. “Sometimes they serve me well.”

Pat Murphy

Fortune in men has some small diff'rence made,
One flaunts in rags, one flutters in brocade;
The cobbler apron'd, and the parson gown'd,
The friar hooded, and the monarch crown'd.

Alexander Pope

In losing fortune, many a lucky elf
Has found himself.

Horace Smith

The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance...This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance.

William James The Dilemma of Determinism (1884)

Fortune and Love befriend the bold.

Ovid

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: It was somebody's name, or he happened to be there at the time, or, it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some of you will be successful, and such will need but little philosophy to take them home in cheerful spirits; others will be disappointed, and will be in a less happy mood. To such, let it be said, “Lay it not too much to heart.” Let them adopt the maxim, “Better luck next time”; and then, by renewed exertion, make that better luck for themselves.

Abraham Lincoln Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1859)

The lovely young Lavinia once had friends;
And fortune smil'd, deceitful, on her birth.

James Thomson The Seasons (1726)

Fortune had so favoured me in this war that I feared, the rather, that some tempest would follow so favourable a gale.

Plutarch

When mine hours were nice and lucky.

William Shakespeare

That conceit, elegantly expressed by the Emperor Charles V., in his instructions to the King, his son, "that fortune hath somewhat the nature of a woman, that if she be too much wooed she is the farther off."

Francis Bacon

The lucky man is honored ...
But earnest striving wins no praise at all.

Theognis of Megara

If hindrances obstruct thy way,
Thy magnanimity display.
And let thy strength be seen:
But O, if Fortune fill thy sail
With more than a propitious gale,
Take half thy canvas in.

William Cowper

Will Fortune never come with both hands full,
But write her fair words still in foulest letters?
She either gives a stomach, and no food;
Such are the poor, in health: or else a feast,
And takes away the stomach; such are the rich,
That have abundance, and enjoy it not.

William Shakespeare

Who thinks that fortune cannot change her mind,
Prepares a dreadful jest for all mankind.
And who stands safest? Tell me, is it he
That spreads and swells in puff'd prosperity,
Or bless'd with little, whose preventing care
In peace provides fit arms against a war?

Alexander Pope

Fortune, the great commandress of the world,
Hath divers ways to advance her followers:
To some she gives honour without deserving,
To other some, deserving without honour;
Some wit, some wealth,—and some, wit without wealth;
Some wealth without wit; some nor wit nor wealth.

George Chapman All Fools (1605)

Fortune, my friend, I've often thought,
Is weak, if Art assist her not:
So equally all Arts are vain,
If Fortune help them not again.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

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