Archive

Quotes

Luck is believing you’re lucky. 

—William Carlos Williams, 1947

Luck takes the step that no one sees.

—Publilius Syrus, c. 50 BC

To put one’s trust in God is only a longer way of saying that one will chance it.

—Samuel Butler, c. 1890

Good fortune turns aside destruction by a great god.

—Instructions of Ankhsheshonqy, c. 100 BC

Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.

—E.B. White, 1944

Misfortune, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

It is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear. 

—Charlotte Brontë, 1847

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1938

To hold a throne is luck; to bestow it, virtue.

—Seneca the Younger, c. 45

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.

—William Shakespeare, c. 1610

We do not suffer by accident. 

—Jane Austen, 1813

It is so difficult not to become vain about one’s own good luck.

—Simone de Beauvoir, 1963

Some folks want their luck buttered.

—Thomas Hardy, 1886