Quotes About Chance

One of the values of centering prayer is that you are not thinking about God during the time of centering prayer so you are giving God a chance to manifest. In centering prayer there are moments of peace that give the psyche a chance to realize that God may not be so bad after all. God has a chance to be himself for a change.

Imagine 1050 blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik's cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have a chance of arriving by random shuffling, of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.

Chance never writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; chance never drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will; nor can it be without absurdity supposed able to do them; which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree.

Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise natural selection alone and unaided could have drawn all the music of the biosphere. In effect natural selection operates upon the products of chance and can feed nowhere else; but it operates in a domain of very demanding conditions, and from this domain chance is barred. It is not to chance but to these conditions that eveloution owes its generally progressive cource, its successive conquests, and the impresssion it gives of a smooth and steady unfolding.

If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.

Journalism is an extraordinary and terrible privilege. Not by chance, if you are aware of it, does it consume you with a hundred feelings of inadequacy. Not by chance, when I find myself going through an event or an important encounter, does it seize me like anguish, a fear of not having enough eyes and enough ears and enough brains to look and listen and understand like a worm hidden in the wood of history.

See that fella over there? He's 20 years old. In 10 years, he's got a chance to be a star. Now that fella over there, he's 20 years old, too. In 10 years he's got a chance to be 30.

Treat all men alike.... give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man...free to travel... free to stop...free to work...free to choose my own teachers...free to follow the religion of my Fathers...free to think and talk and act for myself.

We didn't get that chance because I was afraid. Afraid I had no chance with you.

I plead with my Moonlight fans to give this show a chance if they let me give it a chance. I can’t do Moonlight again — it’s finished. The bottom line is that my true fans will follow me where I go.

As Bill Clinton said so eloquently at the convention, during Vietnam there was a chance to serve; there was a chance not to serve.

We have had a chance to travel to all 56 counties in this state, and I have had the chance to sit around with cups of coffee and having conversations about what matters to Montanans.

This is one country. It has become one country because all of us and all the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents. We cannot say to ten percent of the population that you can't have that right; that your children cannot have the chance to develop whatever talents they have; that the only way that they are going to get their rights is to go in the street and demonstrate. I think we owe them and we owe ourselves a better country than that.

This tremendous friction which cannot, as in mechanics, be reduced to a few points, is everywhere in contact with chance, and brings about effects that cannot be measured just because they are largely due to chance.

Good soldiers never pass up a chance to eat or sleep. They never know how much they'll be called on to do before the next chance.

Further, the same Arguments which explode the Notion of Luck, may, on the other side, be useful in some Cases to establish a due comparison between Chance and Design: We may imagine Chance and Design to be, as it were, in Competition with each other, for the production of some sorts of Events, and may calculate what Probability there is, that those Events should be rather be owing to the one than to the other.

...treasure what it means to do a day's work. It's our one and only chance to do something productive today, and it's certainly not available to someone merely because he is the high bidder. A day's work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters. As your work gets better and your art becomes more important, competition for your gifts will increase and you'll discover that you can be choosier about whom you give them to.

I would say basically the commonplace observation that kids aren't going to earn as much as their parents is now is a coin flip at this point. Are you going to do better than your parents? It's a 50-50 chance, whereas if you were born in the 1940s or 1950s, you had more than a 90 percent chance you were going to do better than your parents. So basically almost a guarantee for most kids that you were going to achieve the American Dream of doing better than your parents did. Today, that's certainly no longer the case.

If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel.

On New Year's Eve, my dear friend lost his battle with depression . . . Though he wasn't the first friend I've lost to suicide, I sure hope he's the last. I wish I had the chance to go back and tell them what they meant to me. I wish I had the chance to beg them to seek help, to keep fighting. I wish they knew that they were surrounded by countless others who struggle on a daily basis.

I was disappointed if I didn't have a chance to win a game, and if I had the chance and didn't do it.

Schrödinger's cat has a 50% quantum chance of coming out of the box alive and a 50% quantum chance of coming out dead. If you got in the box with it, the same would apply to you. So you really don't want to do that.

It's an epitome of life. The first half of it consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.

An investment said to have an 80% chance of success sounds far more attractive than one with a 20% chance of failure. The mind can't easily recognize that they are the same.

One of the reasons I'm lucky is to be around an owner like Jerry Jones. I'm not just saying it. The reality of it is the guy wants to win. As a quarterback, you need ownership and people in the front office and organization to help you win. If you don't get that help, you're always going to be fighting an uphill battle. You feel that, being a part of this organization with Jerry, that he's going to bring in people and sign people and want to improve this football team every year. It allows you to feel like, hey, we have a chance and I have a chance to do some special things around here.

I always loved to cook and entertain but I realized I had the chance to be successful with something that I am passionate about.

As a feminist, I think you never want to have your characters defined by the relationships that they're in, and it did give her a chance to be a sophomore in college without a boyfriend.

He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality.

I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.

If you watch a stretch of TV for a few hours, there is a good chance you'll hear me on some commercial or in some documentary or on a cartoon as some voice of a character.

If you give customers a chance, they'll communicate with you in many ways

For me, the stars are the invisible people on the street that people don't really get a chance to know.

Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.

Chance arrives unannounced. It emerges, and when it leaves, we are lucky if the changes it has produced are only external.

Cancer had a chance to break me down, but I was determined to fight back with strength and positivity.

Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we've missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.

If you're in a hurry to find happiness, slow down. Give it a chance to catch up with you.

You have only one chance to raise your child.

You’re always a kid around your parents… Unless they’re acting like children. Then you don’t get the chance.

When a man's eyes are sore his friends do not let him finger them, however much he wishes to, nor do they themselves touch the inflammation: But a man sunk in grief suffers every chance comer to stir and augment his affliction like a running sore; and by reason of the fingering and consequent irritation it hardens into a serious and intractable evil.

It is possible to produce something that is grammatical either by chance or under the supervision of another. To be proficient in grammar, then, one must both produce what is grammatical and produce it grammatically, that is, in accord with knowledge of grammar in oneself.

It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.

I don't see how you can give someone who lied to the extent that he did a second chance in the same line of work.

There's something great about being a really young actor because you don't have a chance to be nervous. You don't know anything yet. Whereas one of the big challenges as you go through - I've been doing acting professionally for 10 years now - is to not let all the things that you know hold you back and make you more nervous. Once you've had a few people tell you that they don't like your ideas, that voice in your head can creep in that says, "Don't tell them what you think."

I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

This is our chance to build a Britain where everyone benefits from the success of the economy.

Some would assert that Providence was at work shaking out its pockets in Humanity's lap. Other would argue for that mindless choreographer, Chance. Either way it was a simple thing: a lost diary fell into the hands of a soul-sick war hero on a train from Bombay to Jaipur just when he'd grown tired of the scenery and needed something to keep his thoughts from the minefield of his wretched thoughts. In such mild ways is the groundwork laid for first kisses and ruined lives.

My approach to the races hasn't changed in my 20-year career. If I have the chance to attack and to pass, I do it, trying to get the best possible result.