Lottery Luck Quotes

There was so much luck to be had in the genetic lottery; one different code and it was a whole lifetime of forced adaptation.

Luck is not as random as you think. Before that lottery ticket won the jackpot, someone had to buy it.

When Hannah Hudson finds herself abandoned on a Rocky Mountain ranch, even a lottery win doesn’t change her bad-luck life.

I feel like a massive wave of life just washed over me. While luck comes in many guises, winning the lottery pales into nothing compared to meeting unique people.

You know, if you're an American and you're born at this time in history especially, you're lucky. We all are. We won the world history Powerball lottery.

Luck is buying a lottery ticket along with your Yoo-hoo and striking it rich. Nothing about my life is lucky- it is all about hard work, it is all uphill struggle.

The status of celebrity offers the promise of being showered with ‘all good things’ that capitalism has to offer. The grotesque display of celebrity lives (and deaths) is the contemporary form of the cult of personality; those ‘famous for being famous’ hold out the spectacular promise of the complete erosion of a autonomously lived life in return for an apotheosis as an image. The ideological function of celebrity (and lottery systems) is clear - like a modern ‘wheel of fortune’ the message is ‘all is luck; some are rich, some are poor, that is the way the world is...it could be you!

so doesn't that make the universe a giant lottery, then? you purchase a ticket when you're born. and it's all just random whether you get a good ticket or a bad ticket. it's all just luck. my head swirls on this, but then softer thoughts soothe, like a flatted third on a major chord. no, no, it's not all random, if it really was all random, the universe would abandon us completely. and the universe doesn't. it takes care of its most fragile creations in ways we can't see. like with the parents who adore you blindly. and the big sister who feels guilty for being human over you. and a little gravelly-voiced kid whose friends have left him over you. and even a pink-haired girl who carries your picture in her wallet. maybe it is a lottery, but the universe makes it all even out in the end. the universe takes care of all of its birds.

She said in the way you might wish someone good luck on the lottery.

Win a lottery-prize and you are a cleaver man. Winners are adulated. To be born with a caul is everything; luck is what matters. Be fortunate and you will be thought great.

There’s no such thing as God, Charlie, at least not how they say. Just like there’s no such thing as Zeus or Apollo or bloody unicorns. You’re on your own. And that can make you feel either lonely or powerful. When you’re born, you wither luck out or you don’t. It’s a lottery. Tough shit or good on yer. But from there, it’s all up to you… soon as you can walk and talk, you start makin your own luck. And I don’t need some spirit in the sky to help me do that. I can do it on me own. But see, that’s what I reckon God really is, Charlie. It’s that part inside me that’s stronger and harder than anything else. And I reckon prayer is just trusting in it, having faith in it, just asking meself to be tough. And that’s all you can do. I don’t need a bunch of bullshit stories about towers and boats and floods or rules about sin. It’s all just a complicated way to get to that place in you, and it’s not honest either. I don’t need to trick meself into thinking anyone else is listenin’, or even cares. Because it doesn’t matter. I matter. And I know I’ll be alright. Because I got a good heart, and fuck this town for making me try and believe otherwise. It’s what you come with and what you leave with. And that’s all I got.

I think about the shit we've read in school. Those books all about one problem. A kid who's bullied. A kid who's beaten. A kid who's poor. And I think of us and how we've won the shit-luck lottery. We have all the problems.

so doesn’t that make the universe a giant lottery, then? you purchase a ticket when you’re born. and it’s all just random whether you get a good ticket or a bad ticket. it’s all just luck.

In these days of physical fitness, hair dye, and plastic surgery, you can live much of your life without feeling or even looking old. But then one day, your knee goes, or your shoulder, or your back, or your hip. Your hot flashes come to an end; things droop. Spots appear. Your cleavage looks like a peach pit. If your elbows faced forward, you would kill yourself. You’re two inches shorter than you used to be. You’re ten pounds fatter and you cannot lose a pound of it to save your soul. Your hands don’t work as well as they once did and you can’t open bottles, jars, wrappers, and especially those gadgets that are encased tightly in what seems to be molded Mylar. If you were stranded on a desert island and your food were sealed in plastic packaging, you would starve to death. You take so many pills in the morning you don’t have room for breakfast. You lose close friends and discover one of the worst truths of old age: they’re irreplaceable. People who run four miles a day and eat only nuts and berries drop dead. People who drink a quart of whiskey and smoke two packs of cigarettes a day drop dead. You are suddenly in a lottery, the ultimate game of chance, and someday your luck will run out. Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God.

the universe was not kind to auggie pullman. what did the little kid ever do to deserve his sentence? what did the parents do? or olivia? she once mentioned that some doctor told her parents that he odds of someone getting the same combination of syndromes that came together to make auggie's face was like one in four million. so doesn't that make the universe a giant lottery, then? you purchase a ticket when you're born. it's all just random whether you get a good ticket or a bad ticket. it's all just luck.

I met Jay Jonhson. I won him the way poor people occasionally win the lottery: Shameless perseverance and embarrassingly dumb luck, and every time I see one of those sly, toothless, beaten-down souls on TV holding a winning ticket, I think, Go, team.

Life's like a lottery. Sometimes you're lucky, sometimes bad luck follows you. Life is not fair. I'd trade away my computer to be a boy. But God chose me to be a girl, and I can't change that. So you just gotta deal with what you have, and try to be happy about it. Nothing's all bad. There are some good stuff in bad stuff, and sometimes bad stuff in good stuff. Just deal with it.

Oh, I don’t buy lottery tickets... because if I won, and I was capable of that kind of odd luck, then I would also be equally capable of extremely bad luck, like getting struck by lightning, or falling out of window or something. I’d rather just not know.

I hate that phrase – ‘beat cancer’. Cancer isn’t a war or a fight that you win or lose. It’s bad luck. It’s bad genes. It’s bad timing. It’s a postcode lottery. Call it what you will, just don’t call it a fight. Doing so makes all those who don’t make it weak. Or losers. I hate that.

Talk about how various people have been “winners” in “the lottery of life” or have things that others don’t have just because they “happen to have money” is part of the delegitimizing of property as a prelude to seizing it. Luck certainly plays a very large role in all our lives. But we need to be very clear about what that role is. Very few people just “happen” to have money. Typically, they have it because their fellow human beings have voluntarily paid them for providing some goods or services, which are valued more than the money that is paid for them. It is not a zero-sum game. Both sides are better off because of it—and the whole society is better off when such transactions take place freely among free and independent people. Who can better decide the value of the goods and services that someone has produced than the people who actually use those goods and services—and pay for them with their own hard-earned money? Luck may well have played a role in enabling some people to provide valuable goods and services. Others might have been able to do the same if they had been raised by better parents, taught in better schools or chanced upon someone who pointed them in the right direction. But you are not going to change that by confiscating the fruits of productivity. All you are likely to do is reduce that productivity and undermine the virtues and attitudes that create prosperity and make a free society possible.

Each person is a lottery ticket. We are all stubs of our luck.

To a man who has not succeeded we say 'You made a mistake'. To a man who ha lost at the lottery, 'You had bad luck'.

In the lottery, your success or failure is determined by luck. In life, your success or failure is determined by the choices you make—including what you do in the face of luck.

Well, there are people who have flagrant good luck, like they win the lottery or write Harry Potter ..... there are also those like me who just get to enjoy small precious moments like this.

What is the likelihood, of winning the lottery, then lose it all the next day when you step out your front door and get struck by lightning? Probably, very slim, but then anything is possible.

One of the first shrinks I went to after Cass died told me that the brain has a hardwired need to find correlations, to make sense of nonsensical data by making connections between unrelated things. Humans have evolved a universal tendency to seek patterns in random information, hence the existence of fortune-tellers and dream interpreters and people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast. But the cold, hard truth is that there are no connections between anything. Life—all of existence—is totally random. Your lucky lottery numbers aren’t really lucky, because there’s no such thing as luck. The black cat that crosses your path isn’t a bad omen, it’s just a cat out for a walk. An eclipse doesn’t mean that the gods are angry, just as a bus narrowly missing you as you cross the street doesn’t mean there’s a guardian angel looking out for you. There are no gods. There are no angels. Superstitions aren’t real, and no amount of wishing, praying, or rationalizing can change the fact that life is just one long sequence of random events that ultimately have no meaning. I really hated that shrink.

We spent a good part of the twentieth century trying out various forms of revolution, from Marxism to savage capitalism, ranging through each and every intermediate shading. Our hope that a change in government can improve our luck is like hoping to win the lottery: totally without rational foundation.

But even if we were entirely successful at eliminating inequalities of outcome associated with being born into wealth or privilege, the inequalities that remain would not be purged of luck. There would still be another type of luck lurking in the background: genes. This is true not only of standardized test performance and IQ scores. Even appealing to so-called “character” traits (grit, perseverance, resourcefulness, motivation, curiosity, or any other non-cognitive skill) doesn’t get you out of grappling with genetics. These traits, too, are shaped by genetic differences between people. There is no measure of so-called “merit” that is somehow free of genetic influence or untethered from biology.

A tiny part of me felt like I'd won the man lottery and here I was both counting and spending the money. Our skin agreed. We pressed our luck—first his, then mine, then ours—until we had smoothed our way into the thick of it, until nothing else was possible except to get through to each other, in and on through each other, until we eased into the other side.

People who run four miles a day and eat only nuts and berries drop dead. People who drink a quart of whiskey and smoke two packs of cigarettes a day drop dead. You are suddenly in a lottery, the ultimate game of chance, and someday your luck will run out. Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God.

There are numerous studies looking at people that won the lottery and their happiness levels. After six to 12 months, most lottery winners are about as happy or unhappy as they were before winning. Likewise, those who suffer crippling accidents return near to their previous levels of happiness in a similar time frame. What determines our happiness is more choice than circumstances, more skill than luck.

think about it. you're playing survivor with all the people you love. some, by sheer luck of genetic lottery, end up on the right team. this team simply knows how to dominate the game. this team understands there is no referee or rules. in fact, this team is so good at the game, they made up invisible referees and rules for other teams to find. they simply do what they want because they understand there is no such things as rights. how do you win if you're not on this team? you don't. however, the consolation prize for knowing the campground is puppet-stringed by a small herd of psychopaths is there is no one for them to pass the reigns on to. in the end, any evil there is in the universe dies, too. i recommend not making any more players and enjoying ice cream while you watch the firework show we tend to call: sun set.

Meanwhile, the state has grown as addicted to the lottery as its problem gamblers. Lottery proceeds now account for 13 percent of the state revenues in Massachusetts, making radical change all but unthinkable. No politician, however troubled by the lottery's harmful effects, would dare raise taxes or cut spending sufficiently to offset the revenue the lottery brings in. With states hooked on the money, they have no choice but to continue to bombard their citizens, especially the most vulnerable ones, with a message at odds with the ethic of work, sacrifice and moral responsibility that sustains democratic life. This civic corruption is the gravest harm that lotteries bring. It degrades the public realm by casting the government as the purveyor of a perverse civic education. To keep the money flowing, state governments across American must now use their authority and influence not to cultivate civic virtue but to peddle false hope. They must persuade their citizens that with a little luck they can escape the world of work to which only misfortune cosigns them.

It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit. To the crowd, success ears almost the features of true mastery, and the greatest dupe of this counterfeit talent is History. Juvenal and Tacitus alone mistrust it. In these days an almost official philosophy has come to dwell in the house of Success, wear its livery, receive callers in its ante-chamber. Success in principle and for its own sake. Prosperity presupposes ability. Win a lottery-prize and you are a clever man. Winners are adulated. To be born with a caul is everything; luck is what matters. Be fortunate and you will be thought great. With a handful of tremendous exceptions which constitute the glory of a century, the popular esteem is singularly short-sighted. Gilt is as good as gold. No harm in being a chance arrival provided you arrive. The populace is an aged Narcissus which worships itself and applauds the commonplace. The tremendous qualities of Moses, an Aeschylus, a Dante, a Michelangelo or a Napoleon are readily ascribed by the multitude to any man, in any sphere, who has got what he set out to get - the notary who becomes a deputy, the hack playwright who produces a mock-Corneille, the eunuch who acquires a harem, the journeyman-general who by accident wins the decisive battle of an epoch. The profiteer who supplies the army of the Sambre-et-Meuse with boot-soles of cardboard and earns himself an income of four hundred thousand a year; the huckster who espouses usury and brings her to bed of seven or eight millions; the preacher who becomes bishop by loudly braying; the bailiff of a great estate who so enriches himself that on retirement he is made Minister of Finance - all this is what men call genius, just as they call a painted face beauty and a richly attired figure majesty. The confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.

We chose not to discuss a world warmed beyond two degrees out of decency, perhaps; or simple fear; or fear of fearmongering; or technocratic faith, which is really market faith; or deference to partisan debates or even partisan priorities; or skepticism about the environmental Left of the kind I'd always had; or disinterest in the fates of distant ecosystems like I'd also always had. We felt confusion about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers, or at least an intuition that others would e easily confused about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers. we suffered from slowness apprehending the speed of change, or semi-conspiratorial confidence in the responsibility of global elites and their institutions, or obeisance toward those elites and their institutions, whatever we thought of them. Perhaps we felt unable to really trust scarier projections because we'd only just heard about warming, we thought, and things couldn't possibly have gotten that much worse just since the first Inconvenient Truth; or because we liked driving our cars and eating our beef and living as we did in every other way and didn't want to think too hard about that; or because we felt so "postindustrial" we couldn't believe we were still drawing material breaths from fossil fuel furnaces. Perhaps it was because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted "normal," or because we looked outside and things seemed still okay. Because we were bored with writing, or reading, the same story again and again, because climate was so global and therefore nontribal it suggested only the corniest politics, because we didn't yet appreciate how fully it would ravage our lives, and because, selfishly, we didn't mind destroying the planet for others living elsewhere on it or those not yet born who would inherit it from us, outraged. Because we had too much faith in the teleological shape of history and the arrow of human progress to countenance the idea that the arc of history would bend toward anything but environmental justice, too. Because when we were being really honest with ourselves we already thought of the world as a zero-sum resource competition and believed that whatever happened we were probably going to continue to be the victors, relatively speaking anyway, advantages of class being what they are and our own luck in the natalist lottery being what it was. Perhaps we were too panicked about our own jobs and industries to fret about the future of jobs and industry; or perhaps we were also really afraid of robots or were too busy looking at our new phones; or perhaps, however easy we found the apocalypse reflex in our culture and the path of panic in our politics, we truly had a good-news bias when it came to the big picture; or, really, who knows why-there are so many aspects to the climate kaleidoscope that transforms our intuitions about environmental devastation into n uncanny complacency that it can be hard to pull the whole picture of climate distortion into focus. But we simply wouldn't, or couldn't, or anyway didn't look squarely in the face of science.

It’s not against Lottery regulations to lose, obviously - somebody’s got to - but it’s against the Rules to be seen to lose. It’s against the Rules to be seen to win. It’s not just that you break the Rules by sitting there. It’s that you put everyone else in the position of ostentatious Rulebreakers, manoeuvred into flashing their luck just by walking to work.

Luck works only when you work. Even when it comes to lottery, only those who make the effort to go to a lottery store and buy one, stand a chance to win a lottery".

Winning the lottery isn’t luck, it’s an accident. Spending the proceeds wisely is luck.

Luck," Nana made a tsking sound. "That kind of thinking is naive. A monumental love and a great marriage don't simply happen, like winning the lottery. You have to build it and nurture it, and quite often, it's hard work.

The broader need is not just for technical answers-a better childhood program, more micronutrients--but also for greater empathy. As long as our society sees misfortune as the just deserts of those who are lazy or immoral, we're not going to solve these problems. The flip side is that those who are successful need to understand that the root cause of their achievements isn't just hard work and innate intelligence but also luck in the lottery of birth followed by a supportive middle-class upbringing. 'Society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I have earned,' notes Warren Buffett. 'If you stuck me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you'll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil. I will be struggling thirty years later.

Don't journalists represent the public's right to know what their officials are doing? With today's technology, you can run, but you shouldn't be able to hide.

Mathematicians of probability give that a fancy name: ergodicity. It means, roughly, that (under certain conditions) very long sample paths would end up resembling each other. The properties of a very, very long sample path would be similar to the Monte Carlo properties of an average of shorter ones. The janitor in Chapter 1 who won the lottery, if he lived one thousand years, cannot be expected to win more lotteries. Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.

Exercise: What Does Good Luck Feel Like? Imagine that tomorrow morning, you wake up to learn that you’ve won the lottery or inherited a huge sum of money from a relative you didn’t even know existed. Give yourself a moment to really get into this fantasy. What are you seeing, hearing, thinking? Now ask yourself these questions: How do you feel? After the initial shock has worn off, are there any other feelings mixed in with your happiness? Are all of them pleasant?

They imagine that their poverty is transitory, and that they only need a stroke of good luck to transform them into capitalists. Education, they think, is the lucky number in the social lottery, and it will bring them the grand prize. They do not perceive that this ticket given them by the capitalist class is a fraud, that labor, whether manual or intellectual, has no other chance than to earn its daily pittance, that it has nothing to hope for but to be exploited, and that the more capitalism goes on developing, the more do the chances of an individual raising himself out of his class go on diminishing.

My mom always said that the Love family is lucky. Not big luck, mind you, like lottery or sweepstakes winnings, but small luck. Like beating a rainstorm by five minutes every time, sometimes getting upgraded to business class on flights, and scoring close parking spots in crowded superstore lots. We’re lucky in the small ways that, in the end, don’t really matter. It’s a curse, really. Because you’d think we’d be lucky in our namesake, too. By all accounts, we should be.

Juliette didn’t know how lucky she was to have been born into her natural skin, into her white cheeks and porcelain-smooth wrists. There was so much luck to be had in the genetic lottery; one different code and it was a whole lifetime of forced adaptation.

It was incredible to think I’d eaten Sloan’s food without ever having met her in person, that she’d already been in my life in this way for years. It was like I already knew her. Mom was going to flip. Shit, everyone back home was gonna flip. And I’d just weaseled my way into a date with her. I should play the lottery with my luck. My phone pinged. Sloan: So did I make the team? I smiled.

Everyone thinks they’ve won the Magical Belief Lottery. Everyone thinks they more or less have a handle on things, that they, as opposed to the billions who disagree with them, have somehow lucked into the one true belief system.

We sense a dangerous disease infecting our modern culture and eroding hope: an increasingly prevalent view that greatness owes more to circumstance, even luck, than to action and discipline--that what happens to us matters more than what we do. In games of chance like a lottery or roulette, this view seems plausible. But taken as an entire philosophy, applied more broadly to human endeavor, it's a deeply debilitating life perspective, one that we can't imagine wanting to teach young people. Do we really believe that our actions count for little, that those who create something great are merely lucky, that our circumstances imprison us? Do we want to build a society and culture that encourage us to believe that we aren't responsible for our choices and accountable for our performance?

To win the lottery once may be evidence of luck or skill; to win it repeatedly is evidence of skill.

Hard work is great. It buys you more tickets to the luck lottery.

Let’s say someone writes an academic paper quoting fifty people who have worked on the subject and provided background materials for his study; assume, for the sake of simplicity, that all fifty are of equal merit. Another researcher working on the exact same subject will randomly cite three of those fifty in his bibliography. Merton showed that many academics cite references without having read the original work; rather, they’ll read a paper and draw their own citations from among its sources. So a third researcher reading the second article selects three of the previously referenced authors for his citations. These three authors will receive cumulatively more and more attention as their names become associated more tightly with the subject at hand. The difference between the winning three and the other members of the original cohort is mostly luck: they were initially chosen not for their greater skill, but simply for the way their names appeared in the prior bibliography. Thanks to their reputations, these successful academics will go on writing papers and their work will be easily accepted for publication. Academic success is partly (but significantly) a lottery.fn2

The people around here can be bought and sold with a pissed-on twenty-dollar bill and a scratch off lottery ticket, so you go right ahead and try your luck.

Lydia makes every experience better. Being with her feels like luck and fate and winning the lottery. It feels like trust and friendship and home. Her love feels like a surprise so good you’d never dare expect it, but when it finds you, you hold on tight.

She shakes the blues off then she tries her luck Makes a little bet, hopes her horse comes up Pickin’ pockets for some easy money ’Cause she blew the goddamn lot on the National Lottery Alabama 3, ‘Mansion On The Hill’ Album: La Peste, 2000

But other times life changes in an instant, with a lightning stroke of good or bad luck, with glorious or tragic consequences. You win the lottery. You step out onto a pedestrian crossing at the wrong time. You get a phone call from a lost love at exactly the right time. And suddenly your life takes a violent swerve in an entirely new direction.

The two obstacles that you need to overcome to make the law of attraction work for you are to believe that it is a process of creation and to overcome the negative belief you might have about your luck. Let us look at the different steps that you have to follow for making the law work for you. 6.3.1 Understand the “secret” The secret to achieving success is to believe in it. You should consciously train your mind to believe in it. If you

You’ve heard of voodoo economics perhaps? Money magic is the most pervasive of all. Of course it would be, since money itself is the ultimate magic, a piece of paper that can do everything. Everyone wants good money magic, a way to win the lottery, gambling luck, an unexpected check in the mail, but the money magic of everyday life is more often bad. Win some money, get a bonus, have a little inheritance, and a major appliance will go out, the kid will get sick, a tire will go flat. Once you’re as poor as you were before the money arrived, life returns to normal. It’s as though there’s some kind of balance sheet that makes sure we stay at exactly the same level of prosperity all the time.

Once anointed a hero by your fellow man, you lose the right to privacy. You become an object, stripped of some unquantifiable humanity, as if you have won a cosmic lottery and woke one day to find yourself a minor deity. The Patron Saint of Good Luck. It stops mattering what you wanted for yourself. All that matters is the role you played in the lives of others. You are a rare butterfly held roughly at a right angle to the sun.

I delivered the drinks and finished my shift, again wondering if I could possibly win the lottery and never return. But that kind of luck wasn’t in the cards. I knew I’d forever be stranded on the Island of Misfit Toys.