Bob Greene Quotes

Though men determine, the gods doo dispose: and oft times many things fall out betweene the cup and the lip.

Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man.

There is no doubt such a thing as chance, but I see no reason why Providence should not make use of it.

Making plans is a game. Life chooses for you.

Men plan. Fate Laughs. Guis Alera, First Lord

Fortune, which has a great deal of power in other matters but especially in war, can bring about great changes in a situation through very slight forces.

The only time I've tried to make plans, the cosmic sledgehammer has intervened and something else has happened. You just have to wait and see what comes your way, so that's what I do.

Man plans, but God decides.

History is totally unpredictable.

No man can tell what the future may bring forth

Fate occasionally touches us all in ways we don't always understand.

If the course of human affairs be considered, it will be seen that many things arise against which heaven does not allow us to guard.

In life, man proposes, God disposes.

If destiny could bring two people together, then it could just as easily tear them apart, and, if it could tear two people apart, then it could just as easily bring them back together again. There was no beginning, middle and end to destiny. It wasn't neat and manageable. It was random and scary.

So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.

Is there a design in the events of our lives? Or do things just happen, much like a junk yard falling down a staircase? If it's the latter, how do you deal with it?

There are winds of destiny that blow when we least expect them. Sometimes they gust with the fury of a hurricane, sometimes they barely fan one’s cheek. But the winds cannot be denied, bringing as they often do a future that is impossible to ignore.

Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.

Man plans. God laughs.

Where destiny blunders, human prudence will not avail.

Plans are one thing and fate another. When they coincide, success results. Yet success mustn't be considered the absolute. It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate resposne to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure.

You can be careful as far as you can, but you never know when you're going to fall over and break your ankle. It's like when you drive a car, you don't think about crashing, do you?

Intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over.

It is fortune, not wisdom, that rules man's life.

However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.