Quotes About Fortune

Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune's greedily coveted favours, they are consequently for the most part, very prone to credulity.

Good fortune almost always makes some change in a man's behavior - in his manner of speaking and acting. It is a great weakness to want to bedeck oneself in qualities which are not his own. If he esteemed virtue above all other things, neither the favors of fortune nor the advantages of position would change a man's face or heart.

A man in my situation, my lords, has not only to encounter the difficulties of fortune. and the force of power over minds which it has corrupted or subjugated. but the difficulties of established prejudice: the man dies, but his memory lives.

War begets quiet, quiet idleness, idleness disorder, disorder ruin; likewise ruin order, order virtue, virtue glory, and good fortune.

Every woman is the architect of her own fortune.

It's O.K. to accept good fortune.

If you don't have the good fortune to work a lot then you take any job you get offered, whether it's a good job, fun job, a bad job, horrible job, whatever, you just take what you need to take. But I'm lucky in that - at the moment anyway and hopefully forever, but who knows - I get the chance to pick jobs for the kick of it and the fun.

When someone succeeded in quickly making a lot of money in America, people said he had made his fortune.

It is vain to complain of fortune while we fail in policy and conduct.

Men tell me that I've saved their marriages. It costs them a fortune in shoes, but it's cheaper than a divorce. So I'm still useful, you see.

I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream...he realizes that he's gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grownup and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic.

If we knew enough, fortune would turn out to be nature.

Hopefully, I will emerge more shining. If I have that good fortune, if I am blessed in that way - and I do feel I am in the middle of the blessing - then I have faith my service will be greater.

When the desire of wealth is taking hold of the heart, let us look round and see how it operates upon than whose industry or fortune has obtained it. When we find them oppressed with their own abundance, luxurious without pleasure, idle without ease, impatient and querulous in themselves, and despised or hated by the rest of mankind, we shall soon be convinced that if the real wants of our condition are satisfied, there remains little to be sought with solicitude or desired with eagerness.

The people come from everywhere, from five hundred miles, to find their fortunes. By fortune is an ugly, two-faced goddess. When you have lived with her handiwork for half a generation, you hardly notice anymore. You forget that this is not the way life has to be. You cease to marvel at just how much evil man con conjure by existing.

I am when the Chinese, who know everything, build a house, they consult the precepts of an ancient science, Feng Shui, which tells them exactly how, when, and where the work must be done, and so brings good fortune to the home forever.

Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky.

Behold a worthy sight, to which the God, turning his attention to his own work, may direct his gaze. Behold an equal thing, worthy of a God, a brave man matched in conflict with evil fortune.

Time properly invested is worth a fortune.

As material fortune is associated with the properties of the body, so honor belongs to those of the soul.

Good fortune opens the hand as well as the heart wonderfully; and to give somewhat when we have largely received, but to afford a vent to the unusual ebullition of the sensations.

Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure.

God is frightful, God is great--you pick. I choose this: God is in the details, the completely unnecessary miracles sometimes tossed up as stars to guide us. They are the promise of good fortune in a cloudless day, and the animals in the clouds; look hard enough, and you'll see them. Don't ask if they're real.

Honesty is incompatible with amassing a large fortune.

What we take for virtue is often nothing but an assemblage of different actions, and of different interests, that fortune or our industry knows how to arrange.

To make a fortune some assistance from fate is essential. Ability alone is insufficient.

Sovereignty is easily preserved by the very arts by which it was originally created. When, however, energy has given place to indifference, and temperance and justice to passion and arrogance, then as the morals change so changes fortune.

We should strive to go on in fortune and misfortune like a clock during a thunderstorm.

Fortune cannot aid those who do nothing.

We each build our own future. We are the architects of our own fortune.

When the philosophers despised riches, it was because they had a mind to vindicate their own merit, and take revenge upon the injustice of fortune by vilifying those enjoyments which she had not given them.

All those years I had been making movies because I loved movies, and that's what made all the difference. If you're doing it because you love it you can succeed because you'll work harder than anyone else around you, take on challenges no one else would dare take, and come up with methods no one else would discover, especially when their prime drive is fame and fortune. All that will follow later if you really love what you do. Because your work will speak itself.

I don't need to make a fortune, I need to survive.

True friendship multiplies the good in life and divides its evils. Strive to have friends, for life without friends is like life on a desert island... to find one real friend in a lifetime is good fortune; to keep him is a blessing.

Fortune resists half-hearted prayers.

I confess that Magic teacheth many superfluous things, and curious prodigies for ostentation; leave them as empty things, yet be not ignorant of their causes. But those things which are for the profit of men -- for the turning away of evil events, for the destroying of sorceries, for the curing of diseases, for the exterminating of phantasms, for the preserving of life, honor, or fortune -- may be done without offense to God or injury to religion, because they are, as profitable, so necessary.

The riches of scholarship, the benignities of literature, defy fortune and outlive calamity. They are beyond the reach of thief or moth or rust. As they cannot be inherited, so they cannot, be alienated.

If I traveled to the end of the rainbow as Dame Fortune did intend, Murphy would be there to tell me the pot's at the other end.

I've had the good fortune and blessing to run for the offices for which I really wanted to do the work.

Here rests his head upon the lap of earth, A youth to fortune and to fame unknown: Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth, And Melancholy mark'd him for her own.

Fortune favors the well-prepared.

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.

No man actually owns a fortune. It owns him.

How do you deserve a fortune? Render fortunes of service.

I'm swanning round the world looking at the most fabulously interesting things. Such good fortune.

My only advice as an experience older singer is about singing, it isn't about music. To have a career in music is a completely different question and leads to other kinds of advice and other kind of experts. All you can do is someone planted in my mind very early on, this wonderful truism called, "Fortune favors the prepared mind." Be passionate about being a musician. There is no limit to how hard you must work and how detailed you must be in every facet of what you do, either as a singer, as a musician, or as a person.

In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.

Fame and fortune are as hard to find as a lightning strike.