Quotes about chance

"There is many a flower which would not be growing if the dung had not happened to fall where it did."

He did too have a philosophy of life: Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people. (p223)

It was improbable for him to meet his old friends here? Fine, so it was improbable; but it had happened. “Improbable” was something you could only apply to future events.

The laws of probability not only permit coincidences; they absolutely insist on them.

"Chance encounters are what keep us going."

"My cell phone number," she says with a wry expression. "I'm staying at my friend's place for a while but if you ever feel like seeing somebody, give me a call. We can go out for a bite or whatever. Don't be a stranger, okay? 'Even chance meetings'... how does the rest of that go?" "'Are the results of karma.'"

"Right, right", she says. But what does that mean?

"That things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there's no such thing as coincidence."

There’s always enough random success to justify almost anything to someone who wants to believe.

The moral, again, is that some unlikely event is likely to occur, whereas it’s much less likely that a particular one will...The paradoxical conclusion is that it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur. If you don’t specify a predicted event precisely, there are an indeterminate number of ways for an event of that general kind to take place.

A tendency to drastically underestimate the frequency of coincidences is a prime characteristic of innumerates, who generally accord great significance to correspondences of all sorts while attributing too little significance to quite conclusive but less flashy statistical evidence.

Chance is a funny thing and it is easily mistaken for portent.

A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome.

The fact that human intuition is ill suited to situations involving uncertainty was known as early as the 1930's, when researchers noted that people could neither make up a sequence of numbers that passed mathematical tests for randomness nor recognize reliably whether a given string was randomly generated.