93 Inspiring Chance Quotes

In our journey through life, chance often plays a pivotal role, guiding us toward unexpected opportunities and experiences. Whether it's the serendipity of a missed bus leading to a chance encounter or the unpredictability of taking a bold leap, these moments of randomness can define our paths in profound ways. Embracing the uncertainty of chance allows us to remain open to endless possibilities and potential growth. In this post, we explore a curated collection of 93 inspiring chance quotes, each offering unique perspectives on embracing the unknown and welcoming the opportunities that arise from life's unpredictabilities. Let these words serve as a reminder of the beauty and wonder that chance can bring to our lives.

1. “It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide, by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” - Alexander Hamilton

2. “Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

3. “Yet, when these facts are seen side by side with other facts in the case, it is difficult not to become lost in superstitious awe. Their very absurdity seems to prohibit the use of the words 'chance' and 'coincidence.' For the sceptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman Law, it is administered with sub-human inefficiency.” - Eric Ambler

4. “Anyway, it seems to me that the way most people go on living (I suppose there are a few exceptions), they think that the world of life (or whatever) is this place where everything is (or is supposed to be) basically logical and consistent.... It's like when you put instant rice pudding mix in a bowl in the microwave and push the button, and you take the cover off when it rings, and there you've got rice pudding. I mean, what happens in between the time when you push the switch and when the microwave rings? You can't tell what's going on under the cover. Maybe the instant rice pudding first turns into macaroni gratin in the darkness when nobody's looking and only then turns back into rice pudding. We think it's natural to get rice pudding after we put rice pudding mix in the microwave and the bell rings, but to me that's just a presumption. I would be kind of relieved if, every once in a while, after you put rice pudding mix in the microwave and it rang and you opened the top, you got macaroni gratin.” - Haruki Murakami

5. “how can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact opposites?” - Amy Tan

6. “No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.” - Erich Maria Remarque

7. “How often, you wonder, has the direction of your life been shaped by such misunderstandings? How many opportunities have you been denied--or, for that matter, awarded--because someone failed to see you properly? How many friends have you lost, how many have you gained, because they glimpsed some element of your personality that shone through for only an instant, and in circumstances you could never reproduce? An illusion of water shimmering at the far bend of a highway.” - Kevin Brockmeier

8. “It has been a week since Ami died and this morning I woke suddenly hours before dawn, indeed the same hour as when my mother died. It was not a dream that woke me, but a thought. And with that thought I could swear I heard Ami's voice. But I am not frightened. I am joyous. Joyous with realization. For I cannot help but think what a lucky person I am. Imagine that in all the eons of time, in all the possible universes of which Dara speaks, of all the stars in the heavens, Ami and I came together for one brief and shining sliver of time. I stop. I think. Supposing in the grand infinity of this universe two particles of life, Ami and me, swirl endlessly like grains of sand in the oceans of the world -- how much of a chance is there for these two particles, these two grains of sand, to collide, to rest briefly together... at the same moment in time? That is what happened with Ami and me... this miracle of chance.” - Kathryn Lasky

9. “Million-to-one chances...crop up nine times out of ten.” - Terry Pratchett

10. “A statement about luck is a statement about the mind, not about the world... We find what seems to have been the lucky break or the big mistake, and so we thank our lucky stars that we took the road less traveled or curse the fates that sent that little wavelet that flipped us on our backs. With hindsight, we seem to see that everything preceding the pivotal point was leading up to it, tending toward it, and that everything following it grew from it.To any observer outside the lucky one himself, however, luck is simply chance. Chance is neutral.” - Eric Kraft

11. “Men and women are not limited by the place of their birth, not by color of their skin, but by the size of their hope.” - John Johnson

12. “Most of us are not raised to actively encounter our destiny. We may not know that we have one. As children, we are seldom told we have a place in life that is uniquely ours alone. Instead, we are encouraged to believe that our life should somehow fulfill the expectations of others, that we will (or should) find our satisfactions as they have found theirs. Rather than being taugh to ask ourselves who we are, we are schooled to ask others. We are, in effect, trained to listen to others' versions of ourselves. We are brought up in our life as told to us by someone else! When we survey our lives, seeking to fulfill our creativity, we often see we had a dream that went glimmering because we believed, and those around us believed, that the dream was beyond our reach. Many of us would have been, or at least might have been, done, tried something, if...If we had known who we really were.” - Julia Cameron

13. “All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess, to pick it up.” - Carlos Castaneda

14. “Every time I read to her, it was like I was courting her, because sometimes, just sometimes, she would fall in love with me again, just like she had a long time ago. And that's the most wonderful feeling in the world. How many people are ever given that chance? To have someone you love fall in love with you over and over?” - Nicholas Sparks

15. “How can one change one's entire life and build a new one on one moment of love? And yet, that's what you make me want to close my eyes and do.” - Greta Garbo

16. “If we assume that the last breath of, say, Julius Caesar has by now become thoroughly scattered through the atmosphere, then the chances are that each of us inhales one molecule of it with every breath we take.” - James Jeans

17. “I have noticed that even those who assert that everything is predestined and that we can change nothing about it still look both ways before they cross the street.” - Stephen Hawking

18. “No need to feel guilty if you can't be a good man all the time. But anytime your heart is feeling so eager to do even a small good deed, then it might be a good chance for you…to be a better man.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]

19. “It is either coincidence piled on top of coincidence," said Hollus, "or it is deliberate design.” - Robert J. Sawyer

20. “Many are the strange chances of the world,' said Mithrandir, 'and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

21. “Random mutations much more easily debilitate genes than improve them, and that this is true even of the helpful mutations. Let me emphasize, our experience with malaria’s effects on humans (arguably our most highly studied genetic system) shows that most helpful mutations degrade genes. What’s more, as a group the mutations are incoherent, meaning that they are not adding up to some new system. They are just small changes - mostly degradative - in pre-existing, unrelated genes. The take-home lesson is that this is certainly not the kind of process we would expect to build the astonishingly elegant machinery of the cell. If random mutation plus selective pressure substantially trashes the human genome, why should we think that it would be a constructive force in the long term? There is no reason to think so.” - Michael J. Behe

22. “Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if "a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics".To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos. Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on. It happens that you need to set thirtysomething knobs to fully describe the world about us. The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile.Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn't exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life.” - Paul Davies

23. “Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.” - William A. Dembski

24. “The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process.” - William A. Dembski

25. “The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.” - Michael Denton

26. “The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality. Phlogiston did not even exist, and yet its existence was firmly believed and the theory adhered to rigidly for nearly one hundred years throughout the eighteenth century. ... As experimentation continued the properties of phlogiston became more bizarre and contradictory. But instead of questioning the existence of this mysterious substance it was made to serve more comprehensive purposes. ... For the skeptic or indeed to anyone prepared to step out of the circle of Darwinian belief, it is not hard to find inversions of common sense in modern evolutionary thought which are strikingly reminiscent of the mental gymnastics of the phlogiston chemists or the medieval astronomers.To the skeptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of one thousand volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason. But to the Darwinist the idea is accepted without a ripple of doubt - the paradigm takes precedence!” - Michael Denton

27. “a soldier lives always for the next battle, because he knows that before it arrives impossible changes can occur in his favor.” - James A. Michener

28. “Slacker becomes slower if given additional time.” - Toba Beta

29. “When two wise men are blaming one another,then time has come for you to be the third one.” - Toba Beta

30. “Every moment has infinite potential. Every new moment contains for you possibilities that you can't possibly imagine. Every day is a blank page that you could fill with the most beautiful drawings.” - John C. Parkin

31. “But I don't believe coincidences are chance events. I think they're the times we happen to see the mysterious pattern connecting everything.” - Julie Gittus

32. “He felt safe with her. He'd never been safe with another human being, not since he'd been taken as a child from his home. He'd never been able to trust. He could never give that last small piece - all that was left of his humanity - into someone else's keeping. And now there was Rikki. She let him be whatever he had to be to survive. She didn't ask anything of him. There was no hidden motive. No agenda. Just acceptance. She was different - imperfect, or so she thought - and she knew what it was like to fight to carve out a space for herself. She was willing for him to do thar.” - Christine Feehan

33. “When you hate somebody...you give him chance mastering your heart.” - Toba Beta

34. “Chances don't approach you,it's you who approach chances.” - Toba Beta

35. “It's choice - not chance - that determines your destiny. ” - Jean Nidetch

36. “I don't play with my life by talking bullshit.I might have some chances in this bitchy life,but I've got only one fuckin' chance to give...my best shot.” - Toba Beta

37. “Nothing could be more irrational than the idea that something comes from nothing.” - R. C. Sproul

38. “It was at this time that backgammon was invented and began to be popular. It is a kind of paradigm of how wealth is acquired, which in this world is not the reward of intelligence or ability, just as luck is not a product of skill... If luck favours the player, he gets what he wants; if it doesn't, a skilled and prudent man cannot win that which fortune only bestows on whom it likes. It is thus that the good things of this world are apportioned by chance.” - Al Masudi

39. “Today is an ephemeral ghost...A strange amazing day that comes only once every four years. For the rest of the time it does not "exist."In mundane terms, it marks a "leap" in time, when the calendar is adjusted to make up for extra seconds accumulated over the preceding three years due to the rotation of the earth. A day of temporal tune up!But this day holds another secret—it contains one of those truly rare moments of delightful transience and light uncertainty that only exist on the razor edge of things, along a buzzing plane of quantum probability...A day of unlocked potential.Will you or won't you? Should you or shouldn't you? Use this day to do something daring, extraordinary and unlike yourself. Take a chance and shape a different pattern in your personal cloud of probability!” - Vera Nazarian

40. “The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.” - Karl Marx

41. “Life is too precious to be left to chance” - Walter Moers

42. “I loved you long before you loved me. It's the only thing I have you beat at, and I'll bring it up every chance I get.” - Becca Fitzpatrick

43. “Life, for the living, is a gift of opportunity; an exercise of the will to choose.” - T.F. Hodge

44. “I think perhaps love thrives on unlikely circumstances and chance : life thrives on these principles, and is life not love? And love not life?” - Brandon Boyd

45. “Among all the occurrences possible in the universe the a priori probability of any particular one of them verges upon zero. Yet the universe exists; particular events must take place in it, the probability of which (before the event) was infinitesimal. At the present time we have no legitimate grounds for either asserting or denying that life got off to but a single start on earth, and that, as a consequence, before it appeared its chances of occurring were next to nil. ... Destiny is written concurrently with the event, not prior to it... The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. Is it surprising that, like the person who has just made a million at the casino, we should feel strange and a little unreal?” - Jacques Monod

46. “Luck is not as random as you think.Before that lottery ticket won the jackpot, someone had to buy it.” - Vera Nazarian

47. “Be real. I'm going up against three of the world's most vicious ubervillains. I have a very, very slim chance of survival. I have a better chance of winning the lottery, and I don't even play.” - Jennifer Estep

48. “Our consciousness is a proof of our existence in this life.It's a chance given to us, to find a way to reach the eternity.” - Toba Beta

49. “It's funny. No matter how hard you try, you can't close your heart forever. And the minute you open it up, you never know what's going to come in. But when it does, you just have to go for it! Because if you don't, there's not point in being here.” - Kirstie Alley

50. “Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath--all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each?” - H. Rider Haggard

51. “... Nature almost surely operates by combining chance with necessity, randomness with determinism...” - Eric Chaisson

52. “Not that chance dominated events in the early Solar System, for scientific determinism was also functioning. But chance is an essential factor in all evolutionary events, and the birth and development of our planetary system were not exceptions.” - Eric Chaisson

53. “If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.” - David Mitchell

54. “A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation” - Tahir Shah

55. “I'm sorry, but nothing 'just happens'. Stuff happens because either we make it happen or we let it.” - Jessie Jones

56. “And sometimes in life, I imagine, good things do happen. Most of the time, it's the opposite, obviously. But I don't think you should rule out the possibility that just occasionally chance might deal you a good card.” - Sebastian Faulks

57. “عندما تخطئ السماوات يقوم الشباب بتصحيح ذلك. وقد جاءت الفرصة فينبغي ألا تضيع!!” - herbert marcuse

58. “Technology tends toward avoidance of risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. People generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our universe can throw the dice.” - Frank Herbert

59. “Everybody has own gifts from God. You just need to seize the right time, right place and right person to be found.” - Hiroko Sakai

60. “The banana flavour of his accidental conception, and the banana theme of his accidental death, now all seemed to conspire against him and rather suggest the universe, Mr Fate or whoever did have some sort of master plan after all. Despite all his earlier conjecturing, maybe the universe, Mr Fate or whoever was laughing its fat and meddling head at him. The outlandish evidence did seem to speak for itself, truly suggesting a mocking narrative devised by some mischievous author because quite simply a banana condom had brought Midnight into the world and a banana skin had seen him out. Putting those two seeming truths together, Midnight was once again forced to ask such confused and searching questions like:What is this place, where am I heading? And what’s the deal with all the ruddy bananas?” - Tom Conrad

61. “The two go hand in hand like a dance: chance flirts with necessity, randomness with determinism. To be sure, it is from this interchange that novelty and creativity arise in Nature, thereby yielding unique forms and novel structures.” - Eric Chaisson

62. “The most critical risk of all, is not taking the risk if means be dangerous.” - Anthony Liccione

63. “He was dazed, the soft thoughts sinking slowly in. A son. Even a daughter. His child. Immortality. A chance to make good. Pass on the hard lessons learned.” - Helen Hodgman

64. “For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.” - Milan Kundera

65. “She kept walking. The very small, brave part of her brain knew that this would be her one chance. If she turned around, she would lose it.” - Ann Brashares

66. “Welcome to fear, said Moist to himself. It's hope, turned inside out. You know it can't go wrong, you're sure it can't go wrong...But it might.” - Terry Pratchett

67. “You're a beautiful young woman walking without an escort at one in the morning. Why doesn't one of your staff at least see you to your car?""Because they're not sexist pigs who think women are incapable of taking care of themselves."Chance rolled his eyes. "This has nothing to do with feminism. I'm all for gender equality, but the fact remains that women are targeted for more specific crimes than men, and the perpetrators of those crimes often look for circumstances such as these to attack.""See this?" Isa pulled something dark and oblong out of her purse. Chance's mouth twitched."Turbo Vagisil?""No, It's a taser!" Isa said indignantly. "I can take care of myself, Chance. I've been doing that just fine for the past twenty-nine and a half years before you showed up, remember?” - Jeaniene Frost

68. “Let me tell ya. You gotta pay attention to signs. When life reaches out with a moment like this it's a sin if you don't reach back... I'm telling you.” - Matthew Quick

69. “Chance is the nature of our universe. […] madness represents a chaotic reservoir of surprises. Some surprises can be valuable.” - Frank Herbert

70. “Tomorrow is an illusion suggesting that another chance always exists.  It is a dangerously false illusion.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

71. “By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.” - Guy Gavriel Kay

72. “Each of us carries a sleeping tiger inside, and we can’t predict when that cat will wake, stretch, and sharpen its claws.” - Holly Robinson

73. “Phaedra keeps saying she's being selfish. That she hates herself for it, but she does it anyway. She can't deny herself what she wants, even if it brings about her downfall and his." "And have you learned anything from our literary parallel?" "Not really, I keep thinking that she would do it all over again if there were a chance...a chance that it could go right. Even if 99 times out of a 100 the story ends badly, it's worth it if only once she gets a happy ending.” - Cora Carmack

74. “It's not that I can't live without you; it's that I don't want to. There's a difference. We all make choices in life and I choose you.My heart belongs to you. And I'm not asking for it back, even if you won't want it anymore. I'm just asking for a chance to have your again. I promise I'll be more careful with it this time.” - J. Sterling

75. “You're not really in control, not with this falling-for-people stuff. You don't plan who you're going to fall in love with. It's all random - chance accidents of time and place.” - Julia Green

76. “We're deciding the fate of the multiverse with a flip of a coin. Heads or tails, doc. If that isn't a game, I don't know what is.” - E.C. Myers

77. “He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.” - Hunter S. Thompson

78. “...chance is sometimes a wonderful accomplice in crime.” - Émile Gaboriau

79. “If you are only what you are, You at least have a chance Not to outsmart, But be on a par with yourself And that is worth trying.” - Dejan Stojanovic

80. “I'm not so stupid as to believe that you've completely forgotten about your former boyfriend. I know you think there are others here more suited for me and this life, and I wouldn't want you to rush into trying to be happy with any of this. I just... I just want to know if it's possible...” - Kiera Cass

81. “Inbetween yesterday's regret and tomorrow's dream is today's opportunity. Seize the chance!” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

82. “You could make mistakes when you lived together because you knew you'd wake up the next morning with another chance.” - Ariel Sabar

83. “We take the elevator to the third floor, to the office of Dr. Harrison Chance. His name alone has put me off. Why not Dr. Victor?” - Jodi Picoult

84. “Chance favours the prepared mind.” - Louis Pasteur

85. “When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.” - Haruki Murakami

86. “He's throwing everything he can into the air on the chance that something might take flight. And we're the smallest, weakest bird.” - Ally Condie

87. “If you give people a chance, they shine.” - Billy Connolly

88. “Nothing that happens to you was meant to be. The only thing about you that was meant to be is you. Blaze your own trail.” - George Alexiou

89. “Take a chance on God. After all, He took a chance on you.” - Susan May Warren

90. “And then, some morning in the second week, the mind wakes, comes to life again. Not in a city sense—no—but beach-wise. It begins to drift, to play, to turn over in gentle careless rolls like those lazy waves on the beach. One never knows what chance treasures these easy unconscious rollers may toss up, on the smooth white sand of the conscious mind; what perfectly rounded stone, what rare shell from the ocean floor. Perhaps a channeled whelk, a moon shell, or even an argonaut.” - Anne Morrow Lindbergh

91. “Betrayal. Lust. Secrecy. Devotion. I think we do these things to feel more alive. When the truth is that alive is alive -- you can feel it in anything, if you give it a chance.” - David Levithan

92. “Our life is our only chance...” - Laure Lacornette

93. “And as we should all know by now, anytime you predict failure you have an excellent chance of being right.” - Jeff Lindsay