You can't accomplish anything worthwhile if you inhibit yourself.
If life teaches you nothing else, know this for sure:
When you get the chance, go for it.
Maude: Reach out. Take a chance. Get hurt even. But play as well as you can. Go team, go! Give me an L. Give me an I. Give me a V. Give me an E. L-I-V-E. LIVE!
[beat]
Maude: Otherwise, you got nothing to talk about in the locker room.
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. It is wrong then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences, but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.
But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? [...] Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us
Every person sets his or her destiny. This I am sure about. Nothing happens by chance. You make a plan and decide to make it happen.
Always cut the cards...and smile when you lose.
It began with the Wisdom of Foolishness, a commitment to remain fluid, receptive, in process, part of the Membrane of Things as I struck out on that spiritual Route 66, the Experience Trail, determined to follow it to the end. It began with yours truly spontaneously ceasing to be myself and becoming someone else, assuming in the blink of an “I” the role of a drifter, a rolling stone, a wayward mariner lone and visionary on the High Seas of Chance and Possibility.
We may run, walk, stumble, drive, or fly, but let us never lose sight of the reason for the journey, or miss a chance to see a rainbow on the way.
Your chances of success in any undertaking can always be measured by your belief in yourself.
God may not play dice with the Universe, but we're not Gods so we have to keep rolling the dice until we get it right.
If you want to know what real love is, you need to have been rejected at least once, and given at least once someone else's love a chance.
Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
Aye. Fight and you may die. Run, and you'll live. At least awhile... And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance -- just one chance -- to come back here and tell our enemies that they make take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom!!
How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.
Choice, not chance, determines destiny.
Health is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice.
It is something we have been gifted with, took for granted
and we can reclaim and regain.
~ Darina Stoyanova ~
Like fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different... My rational thought processes cling always to the idea of free will, random event; my blood, however, streams easily along a current of fate. I'm here because I climbed out the window at night when I was four.
Destiny is not a matter of chance, but of choice. Not something to wish for, but to attain.
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness concerning all acts of initiative and creation. There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans; that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen events, meetings and material assistance which no one could have dreamed would have come their way.
I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now!"
I think luck is the sense to recognize an opportunity and the ability to take advantage of it. Everyone has bad breaks, but everyone also has opportunities. The man who can smile at his breaks and grab his chances gets on.
I've found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
By happy chance we saw A twofold image: on a grassy bank A snow-white ram, and in the crystal flood Another and the same!
To show what happens when strong writing is deprived of its vigor, George Orwell once took a passage from the Bible and drained it of its blood. [First, below, is Orwell's translation; then, the verse.] Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must inevitably he taken into account . -George Orwell I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. -Ecclesiastes 9:11 [KJV]
Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance.
April O fair mid-spring, besung so oft and oft, How can I praise thy loveliness enow? Thy sun that burns not, and thy breezes soft That o'er the blossoms of the orchard blow, The thousand things that 'neath the young leaves grow, The hopes and chances of the growing year, Winter forgotten long, and summer near. When summer brings the lily and the rose, She brings us fear-her very death she brings Hid in her anxious heart, the forge of woes; And, dull with fear, no more the mavis sings. But thou! thou diest not, but thy fresh life clings About the fainting autumn's sweet decay, When in the earth the hopeful seed they lay. Ah! life of all the year, why yet do I, Amid thy snowy blossoms' fragrant drift, Still long for that which never draweth nigh, Striving my pleasure from my pain to sift, Some weight from off my fluttering mirth to lift? - Now, when far bells are ringing "Come again, Come back, past years! why will ye pass in vain?"
Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death.
Sporadic great men come everywhere. But for a community to get vibrating through and through with intensely active life, many geniuses coming together and in rapid succession are required. This is why great epochs are so rare, - why the sudden bloom of a Greece, an early Rome, a Renaissance, is such a mystery. Blow must follow blow so fast that no cooling can occur in the intervals. Then the mass of the nation glows incandescent, and may continue to glow by pure inertia long after the originators of its internal movement have passed away. We often hear surprise expressed that in these high tides of human affairs not only the people should be filled with stronger life, but that individual geniuses should seem so exceptionally abundant. This mystery is just about as deep as the time-honored conundrum as to why great rivers flow by great towns. It is true that great public fermentations awaken and adopt many geniuses who in more torpid times would have had no chance to work. But over and above this there must be an exceptional concourse of genius about a time, to make the fermentation begin at all. The unlikeliness of the concourse is far greater than the unlikeliness of any particular genius; hence the rarity of these periods and the exceptional aspect which they always wear.
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
