History Quote by Leo Tolstoy

“But what is chance ? What is genius ? The words chance and genius do not denote any really existing thing and therefore cannot…

— Leo Tolstoy

“Chance created the situation; genius made use of it.”

— Leo Tolstoy

The word 'chance' then expresses only our ignorance of the causes of the phenomena that we observe to occur and to succeed one another…

— Pierre-Simon Laplace

What has happened by chance is often difficult to repeat when it is sought deliberately. Chance is a genius.

— Katsuki Sekida

Chance... in the accommodation peculiar to sensorimotor intelligence, plays the same role as in scientific discovery. It is only useful to the genius and…

— Jean Piaget

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

— Voltaire

“One way to express the answer is that it might happen by 'chance'. But 'chance' is just a word expressing ignorance. It means 'determined…

— Richard Dawkins

“Chance is a perfectly good word to describe mathematic possibilities, but it is only a word. It is not an entity. Chance is nothing.…

— R.C. Sproul

Chance throws peculiar conditions in everyone's way. If we apply intelligence, patience and special vision, we are rewarded with new creative breakthroughs.

— Walter Bradford Cannon

“What men call chance is simply their ignorance of causes; if the statement that something had happened by chance were to mean that it…

— René Guénon

What we still designate as chance, merely depends on a concatenation of circumstances, the internal connection and final causes of which we have as…

— Ludwig Buchner

“The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe it just happened by blind chance...the obvious alternative to chance is an…

— Richard Dawkins