Luck quotes
1.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside luck — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Given the brevity of our time here, it does seem likely that our species, too, must have at best a blinkered understanding of the shape of things, the import of certain events and what distinguishes "good" from "bad" luck."
"One should never make one's entrance with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age."
"I work to create systems that can accurately detect pandemics early, determine their likely importance, and, with any luck, crush those that have the potential to devastate us."
"I'm working for myself; what else have I got to work for? How can you work for an audience? What do you imagine an audience would want? I have got nobody to excite except myself, so I am always surprised if anyone likes my work sometimes. I suppose I'm very lucky, of course, to be able to earn my living by something that really absorbs me to try to do, if that is what you call luck."
"With luck, it might even snow for us."
"It's a question of attitude. If you really work at something you can do it up to a point. If you really work at being happy you can do it up to a point. But anything more than that you can't. Anything more than that is luck."
"There's good chances and bad chances, and nobody's luck is pulled only by one string."
"I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I've had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work - just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege."
"There are no shortcuts. You have to work hard, and try to put yourself in a position where if luck strikes, you can see the opportunity and take advantage of it."
"Such is luck! And such the treatment which honest, good perservance gets so often at the hands of unfair and malicious Nature!"
"The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede."
"Photography is a brief complicity between foresight and luck."
"We're [President Barack Obama and I] clear on the fact that we have to stay humble and prayerful. We have to dig down deep to our roots. When things come together, we know some of it is Barack, some of it is us-but a lot of it has nothing to do with either of us."
"Anyone who does not know how to make the most of his luck has no right to complain if it passes by him."
"As ill-luck would have it."
"The two prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck."
"Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her."
"The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren't and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why."
"Luck is a very thin wire between survival and disaster, and not many people can keep their balance on it."
"Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged - well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in - to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed."
