Odds famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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And how am I to face the odds Of man's bedevilment and God's? I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made.
-- A. E. Housman -
If people don't think the odds are against you, you're doing it wrong.
-- Aaron Levie -
When we are young, we think life will be like a supo: one fabric, one weave, one grand design. But in truth, life turns out to be more like the patchwork cloths-bits and pieces, odds and ends-people, places, things we never expected, never wanted, perhaps.
-- Alan Brennert -
I think all of us certainly believed the statistics which said that probably 88% chance of mission success and maybe 96% chance of survival. And we were willing to take those odds.
-- Alan Shepard -
Never before and never since have I seen - and I cannot even imagine, such an amazing rapidity of chess thinking that Capablanca possessed in 1913-14. In blitz games he gave all the St. Petersburg players odds of five minutes to one - and he won.
-- Alexander Alekhine -
Amateurs look for challenges; professionals look for easy trades. Losers get high from the action; the pros look for the best odds.
-- Alexander Elder -
No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail.
-- Alfred Lansing -
It's imprecise and insufficient, defining the homosexual as a person whose gender expression is at odds with his or her sex.
-- Alison Bechdel -
I have not survived against all odds. I have not lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. This is my story.
-- Amy Krouse Rosenthal -
Over futile odds, and laughed at by the gods And now the final frame. Love is a losing game.
-- Amy Winehouse -
Actors are trusting souls, and we must go by gut-level instinct, even after our agents and business managers weigh all the odds.
-- Anne Archer -
Had [Winston Churchill] been a stable and equable man, he could never have inspired the nation. In 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, a leader of sober judgment might well have concluded that we were finished.
-- Anthony Storr -
In my practice as a psychiatrist, I have found that helping people to develop personal goals has proven to be the most effective way to help them cope with problems. Observing that lives of people who have mastered adversity, I have noticed that they have established goals and sought with all their effort to achieve them. From the moment they decided to concentrate all their energies on a specific objective, they begun to surmount the most difficult odds.
-- Ari Kiev -
As the Republican Party has moved farther and farther to the right, I have found myself increasingly at odds with the Republican philosophy and more in line with the philosophy of the Democratic Party.
-- Arlen Specter -
Tedious as it may appear to some to dwell on the discovery of odds and ends that have, no doubt, been thrown away by the owner as rubbish ... yet it is by the study of such trivial details that Archaeology is mainly dependent for determining the date of earthworks. ... Next to coins fragments of pottery afford the most reliable of all evidence ...
-- Augustus Pitt Rivers -
Abhyasa (practice) is a dedicated, unswerving, constant, and vigilant search into a chosen subject pursued against all odds in the face of repeated failures, for indefinitely long periods of time.
-- B.K.S. Iyengar -
Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
-- Barbara Kingsolver -
I like to be against the odds. I'm not afraid to be lonely at the top. With me, it's just the satisfaction of the game. Just performance.
-- Barry Bonds -
They put on fresh gloves and got back to business. Jazz wiped up the blood splatters in the freezer and tossed the tissues in with Howie’s waste. It bothered him that he was leaving evidence behind without some sort of oxygenated bleach, those blood splatters would still show up under Luminol. Of course, the odds of anyone deciding to spray down the morgue freezer and switch on an ultraviolet light were pretty minimal, so it’s not like it was evidence that anyone would ever find or use. Still: Billy Dent’s First Commandment was “Thou shalt not leave evidence.
-- Barry Lyga -
I love you.†His voice was straightforward, affectionate. “You make me remember who I used to be. You make me want to be that man again. Right now, holding you, I feel like we have a shot at beating all odds and making it together. I’m yours, if you’ll have me.
-- Becca Fitzpatrick -
I think everything about my life is magical. I've struggled, and against most odds, I'm truly having the experience of living my dreams.
-- Bella Thorne -
I’m skeptical of passive learning. If you don’t write down what you’re hearing and learning, what the odds you remember it?
-- Ben Casnocha -
Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.
-- Ben Horowitz -
Beware of endeavoring to become a great man in a hurry. One such attempt in ten thousand may succeed. These are fearful odds.
-- Benjamin Disraeli -
I thought I was going to be a ballet dancer for awhile there. I had a good teacher at Interlochen, this arts' academy in Michigan, who taught me the importance of storytelling, and I really responded to that. It seemed like a long shot, but I always play the long odds.
-- Benjamin Walker -
The odds against there being a bomb on a plane are a million to one, and against two bombs a million times a million to one. Next time you fly, cut the odds and take a bomb.
-- Benny Hill -
The human race may well become extinct before the end of the century. Speaking as a mathematician, I should say the odds are about three to one against survival.
-- Bertrand Russell -
The market can move for irrational reasons, and you have to be prepared for that, ... you need to make big bets when the odds are in your favor -- not big enough to ruin you, but big enough to make a difference.
-- Bill Gross -
I'm always happy when actors get rich, because the odds on it are so long!
-- Bill Nighy -
Anytime someone calls you and identifies themselves with their full name, odds are it isn't someone you want to talk to under any circumstances.
-- Bill Simmons -
I stare into a thin, web-like crack above the urinal's handle and think to myself that if I were to disappear into that crack, say somehow miniaturize and slip into it, the odds are good that no one would notice I was gone. No... one... would... care. In fact some, if they noticed my absence, might feel an odd, indefinable sense of relief. This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.
-- Bret Easton Ellis -
One day of praying and six days of fun, the odds against going to heaven are six to one.
-- Brook Benton -
The bottom line: if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the story of your family's positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that your family will thrive for many generations to come.
-- Bruce Feiler -
The Heisenberg principle - If something is closely observed, the odds are it is going to be altered in the process. The more a price pattern is observed by speculators the more prone you have false signals; the more the market is a product of nonspeculative activity, the greater the significance of technical breakout
-- Bruce Kovner -
For throughout history, you can read the stories of women who - against all the odds - got being a woman right, but ended up being compromised, unhappy, hobbled or ruined, because all around them, society was still wrong. Show a girl a pioneering hero - Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Frida Kahlo, Cleopatra, Boudicca, Joan of Arc - and you also, more often than not, show a girl a woman who was eventually crushed.
-- Caitlin Moran -
When I meet large women who walk with confidence and are articulate and really have an understanding of how they walk in this world, I love them so deeply for being able to overcome such unbelievable odds.
-- Camryn Manheim -
The reason welfare is bad is not because it costs too much, nor because it "undermines the work ethic," but because it is intrinsically at odds with the way human beings come to live satisfying lives.
-- Charles A. Murray -
We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
-- Charles Bukowski -
I was glad I wasn't in love, that I wasn't happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective. They lose their sense of humor. They become nervous, psychotic bores. They even become killers.
-- Charles Bukowski -
We lawyers are always curious, always inquisitive, always picking up odds and ends for our patchwork minds, since there is no knowing when and where they may fit into some corner.
-- Charles Dickens -
Without the edge, [life's] boring...If you're doing something that's definitely achievable with 100% odds of success, where's the draw in that?
-- Chris Guillebeau -
For a dying man it is not a difficult decision [to agree to become the world's first heart transplant] ... because he knows he is at the end. If a lion chases you to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water convinced you have a chance to swim to the other side. But you would not accept such odds if there were no lion.
-- Christiaan Barnard -
Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.
-- Christopher Hitchens -
I have lived my life, and I have fought my battles, not against the weak and the poor - anybody can do that - but against power, against injustice, against oppression, and I have asked no odds from them, and I never shall.
-- Clarence Darrow -
The things a man has to have are hope and confidence in himself against odds... And he must be ready to choose death before dishonor without making too much song and dance about it.
-- Clark Gable -
Focus is scary—until you realize that it only means turning your back on markets you could never have anyway. Sharp focus on jobs that customers are trying to get done holds the promise of greatly improving the odds of success in new-product development.
-- Clayton Christensen -
I had always planned when I started directing in 1970 that after a few years I'd get tired of looking at myself on the screen and say: "Hey, let's not do that any more." But then every once in a while something pops up. I'm not saying it won't happen again but probably the odds get less as you set yourself for roles that fit your age group.
-- Clint Eastwood -
The more survival skills an individual has that have been practiced physically and otherwise, the better odds they have for those skills coming to the forefront during a stressful emergency.
-- Cody Lundin -
Anytime odds get stacked up against me, I feel like it's in me to beat it
-- Damian Lillard -
We need to get to kids who have no idea what we do. We need to open the doors wide and let them in. There are many undiscovered voices out there - voices that, against all odds, can rise up and enrich this culture and perhaps change the very nature of the marketplace for the better.
-- Dan Wieden -
Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don't know the odds. It's a big difference.
-- Daniel Kahneman -
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.
-- Daniel Quinn -
I know that the odds are against a marriage lasting 60 years.
-- Darrell Royal -
You can walk as carefully as you want through a mine field; it is still a mine field. But it's also true that if you step up to the plate worrying that you're going to strike out, the odds are that you're going to strike out. Not doing a large ambitious work because you're convinced that Danger Lurks Around Every Corner, the old 'I might be dead this time next year,' is a waste of the Inner Radiance that found you. It's like life insurance. It's betting against yourself. It's blowing out your own flame before someone beats you to it.
-- Dave Sim -
If youre going to reach for it, reach all the way for it. Albums like Purple Rain and Thriller and those kind of records, you had to reach far above the din of cynicism and modern living to get to that place, against all the odds.
-- Dave Sitek -
You can be the one - in - a - million. Don’t be discouraged by the odds to Succeed.
-- David Beckham -
The desire to see and the desire to ratify what one has seen are desires at odds with one another, if only because they proceed from separate places in the imagination.
-- David Berlinski -
Are the odds you face (in life) defeating or motivating you?
-- David Boudia -
I know the odds are all against me and I know you might not feel this way too but I know I would rather die trying to know if I could mean something to you
-- David Levithan -
New Yorkers love the bigness -- the skyscrapers, the freedom, the lights. But they also love it when they can carve out some smallness for themselves. When the guy at the corner store knows which newspaper you want. When the barista has your order ready before you open your mouth. When you start to recognize the people in your orbit, and you know that, say, if you're waiting for the subway at eight fifteen on the dot, odds are the redhead with the red umbrella is going to be there too.
-- David Levithan -
Anytime you make a bet with the best of it, where the odds are in your favor, you have earned something on that bet, whether you actually win or lose the bet. By the same token when you make a bet with the worst of it, where the odds are not in your favor, you have lost something, whether you actually win or lose the bet.
-- David Sklansky -
A lot of Broadway has that immigrant narrative of America as a place where you can become something else against all odds.
-- Deborah Kass -
When I'm at the greatest odds with my body, it's usually because I feel my body's betraying me, whether that's been in the past, struggling with my weight and feeling that I couldn't eat what I wanted to eat, or that I couldn't get my body to do what I wanted it to do.
-- Demi Moore -
It is much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer -
Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer -
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.
-- Edgar Rice Burroughs -
All things are at odds when God sets a thinker loose on the planet
-- Edith Hamilton -
Humanity is looking for a new story. The one it has embraced since the Renaissance is no longer viable. Despite all of its positive contributions to modern life, three hundred years of scientific-technological development has left our civilization in an untenable position-at odds with its natural environment and ultimately its own deeper, collective, soul. Only a global shift in fundamental perceptions, values, and corresponding actions will allow human-kind to resume an evolutionary pat in alignment with nature and the larger cosmos.
-- Edmund Bourne -
The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues--self-restraint. Why cannot I take as many trout as I want from a stream? Why cannot I bring home from the woods a rare wildflower? Because if I do, everybody in this democracy should be able to do the same. My act will be multiplied endlessly. To provide protection for wildlife and wild beauty, everyone has to deny himself proportionately. Special privilege and conservation are ever at odds.
-- Edwin Way Teale -
I know how to take good ideas and turn them into sensible law at great odds.
-- Elizabeth Emken -
The trick at every turn was to endure the test of living for as long as possible. The odds of survival were punishingly slim, for the world was naught by a school of calamity and an endless burning furnace of tribulation. But those who survived the world shaped it--even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them.
-- Elizabeth Gilbert -
Some conservatives have expressed outrage that the views of professors are at odds with the views of students, as if ideas were entitled to be represented in proportion to their popularity and students were entitled to professors who share their political or social values. One of the more important functions of college that it exposes young people to ideas and arguments they have not encountered at home is redefined as a problem.
-- Ellen Willis -
There is no one who cannot be hated, against whatever odds. Nor anyone who cannot be loved, against all reason.
-- Ellis Peters -
Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you’re putting in 100 hour work weeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing you know that you will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve.
-- Elon Musk -
I asked no odds and I give none. A guy got in my way, I run over him.
-- Enos Slaughter -
By all odds, earliest man, so naked to the elements and to deadly enemies, should have existed in a state of constant shock. We find him instead the only lighthearted being in a deadly serious universe.... He alone, with childish carelessness, tinkered and played, and exerted himself more in the pursuit of superfluities than of necessities. Yet the tinkering and playing, and the fascination with the nonessential, were a chief source of the inventiveness which enabled man to prevail over better-equipped and more-purposeful animals.
-- Eric Hoffer -
Science and vision are not opposites or even at odds. They need each other. I sometimes hear other startup folks say something along the lines of: 'If entrepreneurship was a science, then anyone could do it.' I'd like to point out that even science is a science, and still very few people can do it, let alone do it well.
-- Eric Ries -
Most start-up companies fail and it is smart public policy to help entrepreneurs increase their odds of succeeding. But, the biggest loss to our economy is not all the start-ups that didn't make it: It's the ones that might have been created but weren't.
-- Eric Ries -
The odds of going to the store for a loaf of bread and coming out with only a loaf of bread are three billion to one.
-- Erma Bombeck -
The day when the scientist, no matter how devoted, may make significant progress alone and without material help is past. This fact is most self-evident in our work. Instead of an attic with a few test tubes, bits of wire and odds and ends, the attack on the atomic nucleus has required the development and construction of great instruments on an engineering scale.
-- Ernest Lawrence -
You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10-12 to 1.
-- Ernest Rutherford -
Every time you go to the doctor and get a good report, the odds keep staking more in your favour.
-- Fran Drescher -
I wish I could make the statement that 'the odds were against me but you never quit', It was not true. I wanted to give up.
-- Frank Mir -
You take a fraction of reality and expand on it. It's very seldom totally at odds with the facts. It's shaving a piece of reality off.
-- Frank Snepp -
The bravest sight in all this world is a man fighting against odds.
-- Franklin Knight Lane -
Life ain't all beer and skittles, and more's the pity; but what's the odds, so long as you're happy?
-- George du Maurier -
Reaganism is not only at odds with the Judeo-Christian heritage, it will not work.
-- George McGovern -
Labor never quits. We never give up the fight - no matter how tough the odds, no matter how long it takes.
-- George Meany -
So, if you don’t fit in, if you feel at odds with the world, if your identity is troubled and frayed, if you feel lost and ashamed - it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud.
-- George Monbiot -
I once read about a meeting of economists who agreed that if their forecasts were 33 1/3 % correct, that was considered a high mark in their profession. Well, of course, I know you cannot invest in securities successfully with odds like that against you if you place dependence solely upon judgement as to the right securities to own and the right time or price to buy them. Then, too, I read somewhere about the man who described an economist as resembling ‘a professor of anatomy who was still a virgin.’
-- Gerald M. Loeb -
Since 1978 the record pretty well shows that no start-up airline . . . has really been successful, so the odds of JetBlue having long-term success are remote. I'm not going to say it can't happen because stranger things have happened, but I personally believe P.T. Barnum was, in that respect, correct.
-- Gordon Bethune -
To rest in God's power when your own weaknesses seem to be screaming at you? That's grace! To be confident in who God is for you when you feel overwhelmed by odds against you? That's peace! To stand alone against massive intimidation? That's trust! To know beyond any shadow of a doubt that God is bigger, and therefore you cannot lose? That's the faith that moves mountains!
-- Graham Cooke -
Living as if the world out there were somehow separate from us opens the door to the belief system of judgement and the chemical expressions of that judgment in our bodies. Thus we tend to see our world in terms of good germs and bad germs, and use words such as toxins and waste to describe the by-products of the very functions that give us life. It is in such a world that our bodies may become a combat zone for forces at odds with one another, creating the biological battlegrounds that play out
-- Gregg Braden -
I hold no brief for Communists, but I believe in and will defend their right to act independently within the law. I question whether members of the committee are interested in defending our form of government or whether they are attempting to suppress political opinion at odds with their own.
-- Gregory Peck -
Poor children in Baltimore face even worse odds than low-income kids elsewhere, mostly because they remain in impoverished neighborhoods.
-- Gwen Ifill -
Never let the odds keep you from doing what you know in your heart you were meant to do.
-- H. Jackson Brown, Jr. -
When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental - men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre....
-- H. L. Mencken -
There is always one more thing you can do to increase your odds of success.
-- Hal Moore
