Unlucky Quotes - Page 5

• I would kind of, you know, go stand next to some unlucky guy and say eventually, Hi, I'm George. You know, I'm with The New Yorker. I'm a liberal. I'm somewhat left of Gandhi. Do you want to talk? And, you know, they always did.

  George Saunders

  Guy, Want, Next

  "In Search For Answers, Author George Saunders Covers Trump Campaign". "Weekend Edition Saturday" with Lynn Neary, www.npr.org. July 9, 2016.

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• He had the unlucky capacity many men have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to take any serious part in it.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Believe, Men, Evil

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• To say that certainly America was very lucky to get a large amount of land, and the native Indians were extremely unlucky to have white men coming over here, is one thing. But to say that the whole of the American prosperity was based on exploiting the indigenous population would be a great mistake.

  Amartya Sen

  Mistake, Men, White Man

  Interview with David Barsamian, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 29, 2011.

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• Tiger Woods has been unlucky with his body. I don't know whether some of it is self-induced or some of it is just unlucky. But we never know what happens with guys.

  Jack Nicklaus

  Self, Guy, Body

  Source: www.nicklaus.com

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• Well, I see I am not designed to the finding out the Philosophers Stone, I have been so unlucky in my first attempts in chemistry.

  Robert Boyle

  Stones, Firsts, Philosopher

  Robert Boyle (1772). “The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle: In Six Volumes. To which is Prefixed the Life of the Author ...”, p.36

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• I'm lucky enough to occasionally be able to do something I love - write poems - and unlucky enough that what I love confuses and overwhelms me.

  Mary Ruefle

  Writing, Lucky, Able

  Mary Ruefle (2012). “Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures”, p.69, Wave Books

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• What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.

  Italo Calvino

  Disappointment, Believe, Book

  Italo Calvino (2010). “If On A Winter's Night A Traveller”, p.4, Random House

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• If you have certain problems with your brain but are raised in a good home, you might turn out okay. If your brain is fine and your home is terrible, you might still turn out fine. But if you have mild brain damage and end up with a bad home life, you're tossing the dice for a very unlucky synergy.

  David Eagleman

  Home, Brain, Might

  Source: www.goodreads.com

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• And all my endeavours are unlucky explorers come back, abandoning the expedition; the specimens, the lilies of ambition still spring in their climate, still unpicked; but time, time is all I lacked to find them, as the great collectors before me.

  Gavin Douglas

  Time, Spring, Ambition

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• Some persons take reproof good-humoredly enough, unless you are so unlucky as to hit a sore place. Then they wince and writhe, and start up and knock you down for your impertinence, or wish you good morning.

  Augustus William Hare

  Morning, Wish, Enough

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• Woe to the unlucky man who as a child is taught, even as a portion of his creed, what his grown reason must forswear.

  James Anthony Froude

  Children, Men, Woe

  James Anthony Froude (1849). “The nemesis of faith”, p.124

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• But touch me, and no minister so sore.
  Whoe'er offends, at some unlucky time
  Slides into verse, and hitches in a rhyme,
  Sacred to ridicule his whole life long,
  And the sad burthen of some merry song.

  Alexander Pope

  Song, Long, Sacred

  Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson (1839). “The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope: In 1 volume”, p.128

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• All artists have runners, people that tell them what to do, business managers, lawyers, these - if they get the right ones, they're lucky, and if they get the wrong ones, they're unlucky.

  Berry Gordy

  Artist, People, Lucky

  Source: www.npr.org

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• A successful author is equally in danger of the diminution of his fame, whether he continues or ceases to write. The regard of the public is not to be kept but by tribute, and the remembrance of past service will quickly languish unless successive performances frequently revive it. Yet in every new attempt there is new hazard, and there are few who do not, at some unlucky time, injure their own characters by attempting to enlarge them.

  Samuel Johnson

  Writing, Character, Successful

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”, p.39

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• Everybody loves an accent. It you've been unlucky in love, consider pulling up stakes and moving to another country. Then you'll be the one with a neat foreign accent.

  Marilyn vos Savant

  Country, Moving, Love You

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• So powerfully does fortune appear to sway the destinies of men, putting a silver spoon into one man's mouth, and a wooden one into another's, that some of the most sagacious of men, as Cardinal Mazarin and Rothschild, seem to have been inclined to regard luck as the first element of worldly success; experience, sagacity, energy, and enterprise as nothing, if linked to an unlucky star.

  William Mathews

  Stars, Destiny, Men

  William Mathews (1874). “Getting on in the World: Or, Hints on Success in Life”, p.23, Belford Bros.

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• There is a certain solipsism to serious illness which claims all of one's attention as certainly as an astronomical black hole seizes anything unlucky enough to fall within its critical radius.

  Dan Simmons

  Fall, Serious Illness, Black

  Dan Simmons (2014). “The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion”, p.1125, Spectra

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• I used to believe that the number eight is unlucky for me and would even avoid anything that would add up to 8 - like 17, 26 and so on. I would religiously visit astrologers and wear different stones to bring in good luck.

  Emraan Hashmi

  Believe, Good Luck, Eight

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• For this reason, if you believe proverbs, let me tell you the common one: "It is unlucky to marry in May.

  Ovid

  Believe, May, Common

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• Why aren't crazy people content to take over, like, one town? It always has to be the whole word. They can't just control maybe twenty people. The have to control everyone. The can't just be stinking rich. The can't just do genetic experiments on a couple unlucky few. They have to put something in the water. In the air. To get everyone. I was tired of all of it.

  James Patterson

  Couple, Crazy, Tired

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• it's immoral to work to make money. There's something unlucky in it. You got to work for the work. You got to work on a farm, for the farm - then it makes money.

  Christina Stead

  Money, Work, Immoral

  Christina Stead (1948). “A little tea, a little chat”

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• Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism. Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse.

  Sam Harris

  Religious, Intelligent, Healthy

  Sam Harris (2012). “Free Will”, p.61, Simon and Schuster

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• People would be a lot more skeptical if they understood that there is an incredible amount of chance in the results that you observe for active managers. So the distribution of outcomes is enormously wide - but that's exactly what you'd expect by chance with lots of active managers who hold imperfectly diversified portfolios. The really good portfolios contain a lot of really lucky picks, and the really bad portfolios contain a lot of really unlucky picks as well as some really bad ones.

  Eugene Fama

  People, Would Be, Lucky

  "A Father of Modern Finance" by Rebecca Rolfes, www.chicagobooth.edu. 2013.

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• the child unlucky in his little State,
  Some hearth where freedom is excluded,
  A hive whose honey is fear and worry,
  Feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape

  W. H. Auden

  Children, Fear, Worry

  W. H. Auden, “In Memory Of Sigmund Freud”

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• The unlucky hand dealt to clear and precise writers is that people assume they are superficial and so do not go to any trouble inreading them: and the lucky hand dealt to unclear ones is that the reader does go to some trouble and then attributes the pleasure he experiences in his own zeal to them.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Reading, Hands, People

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