Quotes about chance

Marius had lived too little as yet to know that nothing is more imminent than the impossible, and that what we must always forsee is the unforseen.

Without coincidence there would be no story.

Cleopatra's nose: had it been shorter, the whole aspect of the world would have been altered.

The greatest chance is the birth of a great man. It is only by chance that two reproductive cells, of different sexes, met, each containing precisely those mysterious elements whose mutual reaction was to produce genius. We will agree that these elements must be rare and that their meeting is even rarer. That it would have taken little to deviate the spermatozoon that carried them from its course; it would have been enough to deviate it by a tenth of a millimeter and Napoleon would not have been born and the destiny of a continent would have been changed. No other example can better explain the true nature of chance.

Coincidences are the scars of fate.

I've found, though, that in real life coincidence is not the exception but the rule.

One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.

The word “coincidence” always seems to start religious arguments for some reason.

The rich and the famous, Kathy had once said, were seldom that way by accident. It was possible to be one or the other, but very seldom, accidentally, to be both.

None of those choices seemed likely, but if I’ve learned one thing on the job, it is that a coincidence can kill someone just as easily as malice.

“Unless you believe it was a coincidence that Melvin the Rat turned up at a party we were hosting.”

Actually I thought it probably was, but I found that when people are nursing a grievance it’s a waste of time trying to explain the ubiquitous nature of coincidence in the universe. People always want things to happen for a reason.

“The timing might not be significant,” I said. “Just because two things happen at the same time doesn’t mean they’re related.”

Abigail gave me a withering look. But everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.