Quotes About Luck

People really don't like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either. If you use better data, you can find better values; there are always market inefficiencies to exploit, and so on. But it has a broader and less practical message: don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation.

This perhaps was what lay at the root of the hysteria surrounding what came to be known as the Gold Rush: Men desiring a feeling of fortune; the unlucky masses hoping to skin or borrow the luck of others, or the luck of a destination. A seductive notion, and one I thought to be wary of. To me, luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. You had to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it.

I like to say two things in life that mean the most: genetics and luck. When you look at it realistically, genetics is luck too. Because you could have been born in some really terrible situation and never had a chance to realize yourself or see who you were. And so the luck of genetics and then after that, circumstances, those are the two guiding things.

Luck take a second look at what appears to be someone's good luck. You'll find not luck but preparation, planning, and success-producing thinking.

I prefer unlucky things. Luck is vulgar. Who wants what luck would bring? I don't.

It takes a lot of things to work together in order to be wealthy but with a little luck, a lot of luck... You've got to be good at something. For a 20-year-old, you don't have to know exactly what you want to do, you've just got to go find something you can be great at, and then go be great at it.

The best luck of all is the luck you make for yourself.

What you do is you say, fine, you want to go to Mexico or some other country, good luck. We wish you a lot of luck. But if you think you're going to make your air conditioners or your cars or your cookies or whatever you make and bring them into our country without a tax, you're wrong.

A person who sets his or her mind on the dark side of life, who lives over and over the misfortunes and disappointments of the past, prays for similar misfortunes and disappointments in the future. If you will see nothing but ill luck in the future, you are praying for such ill luck and will surely get it. (Prentice Mulford)

It's awful bad luck to bring a woman aboard the ship." "It's awful worse luck not to.

There was only really one accident that was kinda bad but it was nothing to do with booze, just bad luck... I was having a hard time a couple of years ago... I'm a good driver, I just had bad luck.

And then it occurs to me. They are frightened. In me, they see their own daughters, just as ignorant, just as unmindful of all the truths and hopes they have brought to America. They see daughters who grow impatient when their mothers talk in Chinese, who think they are stupid when they explain things in fractured English. They see that joy and luck do not mean the same to their daughters, that to these closed American-born minds "joy luck" is not a word, it does not exist. They see daughters who will bear grandchildren born without any connecting hope passed from generation to generation.

For the hundredth time tonight, I’m back with Lulu, on Jacques’s barge, the improbably named Viola. She’d just toldme the story of double happiness and we were arguing over the meaning. She’d thought it meant the luck of the boy getting the job and the girl. But I’d disagreed. It was the couplet fitting together, the two halves finding each other. It was love. But maybe we were both wrong, and both right. It’s not either or, not luck or love. Not fate or will. Maybe for double happiness, you need both.

Success is made up of courage, brains, and luck. Since the first two are a function of the third, it's pretty much all luck.

Luck is merely an illusion, trusted by the ignorant and chased by the foolish.

Don't you know by now, luck don't lead to anything or why you keep on moving

Success is better than failure; an attempt is a better attempt, it is better as an attempt, if competent than if incompetent; and it is better to succeed through competence - aptly - than through sheer luck.

A margin of safety is achieved when securities are purchased at prices sufficiently below underlying value to allow for human error, bad luck, or extreme volatility in a complex, unpredictable and rapidly changing world.

When the rhythms of our body-mind are in synch with nature's rhythms, when we are living in harmony with life, we are living in the state of grace. To live in grace is to experience that state of consciousness where things flow effortlessly and our desires are easily fulfilled. Grace is magical, synchronistic, coincidental, joyful. It's that good-luck factor. But to live in grace we have to allow nature's intelligence to flow through us without interfering.

Playing good girls in the '30s was difficult, when the fad was to play bad girls. Actually I think playing bad girls is a bore; I have always had more luck with good girl roles because they require more from an actress.

I got into music by happenchance and luck and wearing a t-shirt with "I hate Pink Floyd" on it. The irony has never failed to amuse me ever since because I didn't hate Pink Floyd at all! And yet you have an entire range of people out there believing that the best thing you can do in life is to hate Pink Floyd. Come on, It's because it's the world I live in!

It is a great piece of skill to know how to guide your luck even while waiting for it.

Europe is often held up as a cautionary tale, a demonstration that if you try to make the economy less brutal, to take better care of your fellow citizens when they're down on their luck, you end up killing economic progress. But what European experience actually demonstrates is the opposite: social justice and progress can go hand in hand.

No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance. And through the element of chance, guesswork and luck come to play a great part in war.

While persistence offers no guarantees, it does give 'luck' a chance to operate.

She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.

A Dauntless Ferris wheel wouldn’t have cars. You would just hang on tight with your hands, and good luck to you.

Her definition of romance was absentminded intimacy, the way someone else's hand stray to your plate of food. I replied: no, that's just friendship; romance is always knowing exactly where that someone else's hands are. She smiled and said, there was a time I thought that way, too. But at the heart of the romance is the knowledge that those hands may wander off elsewhere, but somehow through luck or destiny or plain blind groping they'll find a way back to you, and maybe you'll be smart enough then to be grateful for everything that's still possible, in spit of your own weaknesses- and his.

If a life can be ruined in a single moment, a moment of betrayal, or violence, or ill luck, then why can a life not also be saved, be worth living, be made, by just a few pure moments of perfection?

There is something wrong with our system when I can leave here and make billions of dollars in 10 years while millions of students can't even afford to pay off their loans, let alone start a business. We all know you don't get successful just by having a good idea or working hard. You get successful by being lucky too. If I had to support my family growing up, instead of having the time to learn how to code. If I didn't know that I was gonna be fine if Facebook didn't work out, then I wouldn't be standing up here today. And if we're honest, we all know how much luck we've had.

With any luck, by the time NASA's space probe hits Pluto, you'll be booking a spaceflight with a privately run suborbital airline.

You have to have the mentality of executing your game when you don't feel like there's a lot of hope. I think the best feeling is when somebody pushes you to the limit and you dig down a little bit extra. By the same token, you also need a little luck. Sometimes they come together.

If this is a good-luck month for us, that would be great.

When a man is down on his luck he seems to consume all he can get of coffee and doughnuts.

I want a strong man, but a gentle one. And, most unlikely of all, but most essential, I want a man with a capacity for love - to give it generously and accept it joyously. I also want somebody who, when I say, "Let's call it quits," won't hang on; who'll say, "All right, it was fun while it lasted. So long and good luck."

Concentration attracts luck factor.

The thing to keep in mind is that the answer to the question I often get - Are leaders born or made? - is an emphatic yes! All leaders are born, and all are made, through devoted practice of reflecting on experience to learn what's worked and what hasn't, good coaching and accountability pressure to grow, good luck, and, of course, some talent.

There is no such thing as luck, merely opportunity meeting preparedness. George S. Patton Jr.

I had a stroke in 1985... I called it a "stroke of luck." I said, "Life is like a train trip. You're looking out the window and everything is whipping past and you're not really seeing anything, and you need to get off the train and walk around a bit."

Now the bigots have to get creative. Good luck coming up with slurs for Chechens. Go back where you came from, Ushanka head.

Luck happens when opportunity encounters the prepared mind.

So many people didn’t want to touch the project with a 10-foot pole. Literally, I had people laughing and saying, ‘You’re making an album? Good luck.’ … But if you sit down and talk music with me for 10 minutes, you know that’s my passion.

I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.

Hope is not a strategy. Luck is not a factor. Fear is not an option.

In my day it was 75 percent car and mechanic, 25 percent driver and luck. Today it's 95 percent car.

The judgement makes no sense at all. It exposes the country, Turkey, to ridicule. It would have been so much better if Ahmet Davotgulu had behaved like a medieval jester, but no such luck for poor Turkey. Its Prime Minister is not taken seriously by too many people.

In tennis, because of the way it's scored, I don't think that scoring one point out of luck is ever decisive in winning. But, of course, it depends on the moment.

I feel that luck is a product of hard work.