Luck And Skill Quotes

“There are rules to luck, not everything is chance for the wise; luck can be helped by skill.”

— Baltasar Gracian Y Morales

“Luck is often just skill expressing itself without the brain's consent.”

— R.M. ArceJaeger

“You need luck to keep going. It takes more than skill to stay alive.”

— Walter Farley

“This is ten percent luck, Twenty percent skill, Fifteen percent power of will, Five percent pleasure, Fifty percent pain, and a hundred percent reason to remember the name.”

— Mike Shinoda

“Orm always afterwards used to say that, after good luck, strength, and skill at arms, nothing was so useful to a man who found himself among foreigners as the ability to learn a language.”

— Frans G. Bengtsson

“For a mother, mornings of young, school-age children are a carefully orchestrated combination of timing, skill, and luck. It's nothing short of an act of God to get three children to school by eight, looking halfway presentable.”

— Jill Smokler

“Skill is no substitute for luck.”

— Peter James West

“It takes vast willpower, luck, and skill to be the first. But it takes a gigantic heart to be number two.”

— Johan Harstad

“Luck is only my lover, not my wife," replied Bahktiaan easily. He drew his saber. "If ever I wed, it will be skill and intelligence."
"Tedious bedfellows," said Sergi.”

— Kate Elliott

“It was at this time that backgammon was invented and began to be popular. It is a kind of paradigm of how wealth is acquired, which in this world is not the reward of intelligence or ability, just as luck is not a product of skill ... If luck favours the player, he gets what he wants; if it doesn't, a skilled and prudent man cannot win that which fortune only bestows on whom it likes. It is thus that the good things of this world are apportioned by chance.”

— Mas'udi

“It had taken skill, tact, an ability to choose friends well, and a great deal of luck”

— Guy Gavriel Kay

“We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion which I have gradually come to accept by reading what other survivors have written, including myself, when I re-read my writings after a lapse of years. We, the survivors, are not only a tiny but also an anomalous minority. We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.”

— Primo Levi

“Then again, she had-through a bizarre combination of skill, dumb luck and incredible misfortune-managed to build up a file any Debunker would envy.”

— Stacia Kane

“In a duel, man to man, sword against sword, it can be a lack of skill that gets you killed. Often as not, though, it'll be a matter of luck, or if it goes on too long, then it'll be the man who tires first that tends to die.
In the end it's about staying power. They should put that on headstones, Got tired.”

— Mark Lawrence

“To the soldier, luck is merely another word for skill.”

— Patrick MacGill

“Captaincy is 90 per cent luck and 10 per cent skill. But don't try it without that 10 per cent.”

— Richie Benaud

“So it's probably eighty percent luck and twenty percent skill.”

— Chris LeDoux

“It seems I have always been fortunate to be in a certain provident, which must be my sole skill, and worth, and luck. [p. 138]”

— Chang-rae Lee

“As an immerser I progressed to the ranks I aspired to-those that granted me a certain cachet and income while keeping me from fundamental responsibilities. This is what I excelled at: the life-technique of aggregated skill, luck, laziness and chutzpah that we call floaking.”

— China Miéville

“Why did investment banking pay so many people with so little experience so much money? Answer: When attached to a telephone, they could produce even more money. How could they produce money without experience? Answer: Producing in an investment bank was less a matter of skill and more a matter of intangibles-flair, persistence, and luck.”

— Michael Lewis

“It is a great piece of skill to know how to guide your luck even while waiting for it.”

— Baltasar Gracian

“Some people, through luck and skill, end up with a lot of assets. If you're good at kicking a ball, writing software, investing in stocks, it pays extremely well.”

— Bill Gates

“How many times had he felt alone at midnight, with the hard dark pressing in and no sign of morning? Many times before, and with luck he would survive this one as he had survived the others. No, he decided. With more than luck. With every skill of reasoning and power of concentration he had. That, plus some good old fashioned lowdown strength of will.”

— Robert McCammon

“Goals are for losers. Your mind isn't magic. It's a moist computer you can program. The most important metric to track is your personal energy. Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Happiness is health plus freedom. Luck can be managed, sort of. Conquer shyness by being a huge phony (in a good way). Fitness is the lever that moves the world. Simplicity transforms ordinary into amazing.”

— Scott Adams

“As it happened, the guy who was the honor man or best in our class was part of our platoon. He never had as many kills as I did, though, at least partly because he was sent to the Philippines for a few months while I spent my time in Iraq. You need skill to be a sniper, but you also need opportunity. And luck.”

— Chris Kyle

“He's very pretty. For a human."
"He's very broken," said Magnus. "Like a lovely vase that someone has smashed. Only luck and skill can put it back together the way it was before.”

— Cassandra Clare

“Being a successful investor & winning in the stock market is a matter of skill & discipline and not luck alone”

— Jack D. Schwager

“You may have succeeded in shutting down the attack simulation, girl, but it was by luck alone, not skill. I would die of shock if you managed to do anything useful again for a long time
This is the Marcus that Tobias knows. The one who knows right where to hit to cause the most damage.”

— Veronica Roth

“Wall Street's favorite scam is pretending that luck is skill.”

— Ronald Ross

“Here is part of the tradeoff with diversification. You must be diversified enough to survive bad times or bad luck so that skill and good process can have the chance to pay off over the long term.”

— Joel Greenblatt

“A shot that goes in the cup is pure luck, but a shot to within two feet of the flag is skill.”

— Ben Hogan

“Don't confuse luck with skill when judging others, and especially when judging yourself.”

— Carl Icahn

“Luck is when skill meets opportunity.”

— Vinnie Paz

“It's human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation (particularly if you're the lucky manager).”

— William J. Bernstein

“Once the true relationship between inflation and unemployment is understood, with luck and skill, a free lunch is possible.”

— Paul Ormerod

“What is the most overrated skill for an entrepreneur? The most overrated skill is skill. Luck is more important. The entrepreneur gets credit for being this genius, when really he was just at the right place at the right time.”

— Ken Hendricks

“I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory! Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.”

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

“There may be such a thing as habitual luck. People who are said to be lucky at cards probably have certain hidden talents for those games in which skill plays a role. It is like hidden parameters in physics, this ability that does not surface and that I like to call "habitual luck".”

— Stanislaw Ulam

“How do you become enlightened? I don't know: Luck, karma, skill, friends in high places, friends in low places.”

— Frederick Lenz

“Seeking is all very well, but holding requires greater talent: Seeking involves some luck; now the demand is for skill.”

— Ovid

“In creative endeavors luck is a skill.”

— Twyla Tharp

“Nowadays when a poet with one privately printed book can have his next three years taken care of by a Guggenheim fellowship, a Kenyon Review fellowship, and the Prix de Rome, it is hard to remember what chances the poet took in that small-town world, how precariously hand-to-mouth his existence was. And yet in one way the old days were better; [Vachel] Lindsay after a while, by luck and skill, got far more readers than any poet could get today.”

— Randall Jarrell

“To guess what to keep and what to throw away takes considerable skill. Actually it is probably merely a matter of luck, but it looks as if it takes considerable skill.”

— Richard P. Feynman

“The evidence is unequivocal, there's a great deal more luck than skill in people getting very rich.”

— Daniel Kahneman