Chance

What the many call chance is really the work of mind, necessity, and divine art cooperating.

Chance is a real but incidental cause: the coincidence of causal lines that might have met otherwise.

Atoms swerve by chance from their downward path, and from this tiny randomness all freedom and becoming arise.

Either providence or atoms; but in either case, accept what befalls as part of the whole.

What men call chance is only the hidden face of divine providence; nothing happens at random in God's world.

Chance is real relative to created causes, but all coincidences are foreseen and ordered by divine providence.

Fortune governs half our actions, but leaves the other half to be seized by the bold.

In nature there is nothing contingent; chance is only the name for our ignorance of the order of causes.

Chance is nothing in itself; it is the name we give to causes we have not yet discovered, measured by probability.

What the historian calls chance is only the gap in his understanding of the infinitesimal causes that compose history.

Real chance is the price of a world in which freedom, novelty, and genuine moral seriousness are possible.