Milan Kundera Quotes

Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities.

In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment.

Luck is statistics taken personally.

Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.

Used to think that luck wuz luck and nuthin' else but luck-- It made no diff'rence how or when or where or why it struck; But sev'ral years ago I changt my mind, an' now proclaim That luck's a kind uv science--same as any other game.

By the laws of statistics we could probably approximate just how unlikely it is that it would happen. But people forget especially those who ought to know better, such as yourself that while the laws of statistics tell you how unlikely a particular coincidence is, they state just as firmly that coincidences do happen.

When a coincidence seems amazing, that's because the human mind isn’t wired to naturally comprehend probability & statistics.

If a man is both wise and lucky, he will not make the same mistake twice. But he will make any one of ten thousand brothers or cousins of the original.

Almost all life depends on probabilities.

Scientists do not believe in fundamental and absolute certainties. For the scientist, certainty is never an end, but a search; not the ordering of certainty, but its exploration. For the scientist, certainty represents the highest degree of probability.

Open the history of the past at whatsoever page you will and there you shall find coincidence at work bringing about events that the merest chance might have averted. Indeed, coincidence may be defined as the tool used by Fate to shape the destinies of men and nations.

A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.

God not only plays dice, he throws them in the corner where you can't see them.

It is no great wonder if in long process of time, while fortune takes her course hither and thither, numerous coincidences should spontaneously occur. If the number and variety of subjects to be wrought upon be infinite, it is all the more easy for fortune, with such an abundance of material, to effect this similarity of results.

They were at the wrong place at the wrong time naturally they became heroes

Million-to-one chances...crop up nine times out of ten.

What are the odds that two separate writers, strangers, a thousand miles apart, would each invent fictions in which guys take girls to an esoteric frog lecture on their first date? If that isn't synchronicity, it's something equally as weird.

Random questions are the least random of all questions.

Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which - miraculously, it seems - merge into a significant event.

Nothing happens quite by chance. It's a question of accretion of information and experience ... it's just chance that I happened to be here at this particular time when there was available and at my disposal the great experience of all the investigators who plodded along for a number of years.

Random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance. ~Jubal Harshaw

Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.

Fate laughs at probabilities.

In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.