Quotes · Skopia

19 quotes

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Scientific literature

Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.

Stephen Jay Gould

1989

★ 0.9

We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.

Stephen Jay Gould

1996

★ 1.8

We know the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?

1776

★ 1.9

Scientific literature

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

Stephen Jay Gould

1989

★ 1.9

There are vicissitudes in all things.

The Eunuch · 161 BC

★ 2.1

Philosophical literature

What place can be left for random action, when God constraineth all things to order?

The Consolation of Philosophy · 523

★ 2.1

Play · Tragedy (play)

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.

William Shakespeare

Cymbeline · 1611

★ 2.2

That's the way the ball bounces.

1952

★ 2.7

O Fortune, Fortune, all men call thee fickle.

William Shakespeare

1597

★ 3.2

Political literature

Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.

An Essay on the History of Civil Society · 1767

★ 3.5

Scientific literature

If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum.

Arthur Eddington

1928

★ 3.5

Historical literature

Vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire · 1789

★ 3.7

Film · Superhero (film) · Crime drama (film) · Superhero · Crime drama

The world is cruel, and the only morality in a cruel world is chance. Unbiased, unprejudiced…fair.

Two-Face/Harvey Dent

The Dark Knight · 2008

★ 3.7

Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.

Khaled Hosseini

And the Mountains Echoed · 2013

★ 3.7

Film · Drama (film) · Drama

I don’t know if we each have a destiny, or if we’re all just floatin’ around accidental-like on a breeze. But I, I think maybe it’s both. Maybe both get happening at the same time.

Forrest Gump · 1994

★ 3.9

Play · Tragedy (play)

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving.

William Shakespeare

Othello · 1604

★ 4.7

Play · History (play) · Tragedy (play)

There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

William Shakespeare

Julius Caesar · 1599

★ 6.4

Film · Drama (film) · Drama

My mama always said life was like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get.

Forrest Gump · 1994

★ 7.8

Scripture · Religious literature

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 favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Ecclesiastes 9:11

931 BC

★ 8.4