Bad luck

“ The latter dreams a good deal, while the former divides his time between trying to guess the lucky numbers and avoiding evil omens. Bad luck walks arm in arm with him beneath every ladder, and below every safe that is being hoisted to a top-floor room. If he forgets anything when he is leaving home in the morning, and has to turn back, he is ruined for the day. ”

“ Everything which depends entirely on chance is exactly even. If the man you envy to-day on account of some piece of unquestionably good luck, were to be as closely watched to-morrow, he would be seen to suffer some piece of as unquestionably bad luck. ”

“ I have had all sorts of luck in my day—good luck and bad luck. When I’m prosperous I always hope to be more prosperous still, and when I have bad luck, I always wish for worse luck—if it’ll only come. ”

“ Now, whether we consider the epithet sweet as bitterly ironical, or deem it as a wish that prosperity may harden the heart to the accomplishment of future damnation, as in the case of Dives, we must in either sense grant that it is an oath of powerful hatred and venom. Occasionally the curse of “Bad luck to you!” produces an admirable retort, which is pretty common. When one man applies it to another, he is answered with “Good luck to you, thin; but may neither of thim ever happen.”
“Six eggs to you, an' half-a-dozen o' them rotten!”—like “The devil go with you an' sixpence!” ”

“ Others, the maddest, fallen from the height of their hopes in a minute, experienced that long movement of mad anguish in which people will not, cannot, believe in bad luck. Their eyes had that wandering look that sees the shape of things no longer ”

“ They can turn out favorable or not. When a preponderance of chance events has occurred unfavorably, you've got bad luck. It's a fancy name for a lot of chance results that didn't go your way. But the gambler defines it differently. For him, luck refers to the future, and you've got bad luck when future chance events won't go your way. Scientific investigations into this have been inconclusive, but everyone knows that some people are lucky and others aren't. All we've got are hints and glimmers, the fumbling touch of a rudimentary talent. ”

“ It has greatly influenced their life philosophy and policy. On one side, good luck may mean something for nothing, the extreme case of prosperity and felicity. On the other side, ill luck may mean failure, loss, calamity, and disappointment, in spite of the most earnest and well-planned endeavor. The minds of men always dwell more on bad luck. They accept ordinary prosperity as a matter of course. ”

“ Let your luck depend upon your own efforts, and take things by the forelock and make them come your way. Things will happen you just as you intend they shall.
There is really no such thing as bad luck, for if a thing does not happen because of your mistakes, it is not bad luck but mistake. ”

“ No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm.”
Of the things closely associated in the popular mind with good or bad luck, what in short one may or may not do to obtain the favors or turn aside the frowns of fortune, the list is a long one. We say “God bless me!” when we sneeze, as an invocation to good luck. Then, for instance, it is considered lucky to find a cast-off horseshoe, or a four-leaved clover, or to see the new moon over the right shoulder, or to have a black cat in the house, especially one that comes to you of its own accord. ”

“ For instance, it is luck to be born handsome, strong, and healthy; it is luck to be born rich, or of generous parents who spend a little fortune in giving you a first-class education.
What is absurd, however, is to say that you are always unlucky. You cannot always be unlucky any more than you can always be lucky. When a man says to you, 'I am pursued by bad luck,' or, 'This is my usual bad luck,' you know that he is lazy, quarrelsome, unreliable, foolish, or a drunkard.
You may be unlucky at piquet a whole evening—even, though seldom, a whole week ”

“ What sort of bad luck?"
"Why, neither on the turf nor at Monte Carlo. But a speculation has gone wrong, and I'm adrift. I shall have to leave this flat. How I'm going to keep myself alive, I don't know yet. ”

“ I am certain from what I have seen that what so many call 'bad luck' comes in nine cases out of ten from putting that maxim the other way round and satisfying your pleasure first and attending to work and duty afterwards. ”

“ They are too generous, or they are too negligent; and then some people seem to have what is called "bad luck"—that is to say, when anything falls, they are under it; when anything bad happens, it happens to them. ”

“ It’s good luck, and not hard work, that gives him a ‘golden hole,’ where he can’t help digging up gold like potatoes, and it’s luck, bad luck, that turns him out a beggar from every ‘show’ for years, till he hasn’t got a shirt to his back. ”

“ Neither is it necessary that the bad luck shall be great at the first misfortune. It may be but the loss of a few dollars which another could easily stand. It may be only a few days of sickness which would be of no consequence to someone else. ”

“ This is an unlucky number to a merchant, a banker, or a mechanic. It foretells bad luck of some kind, though it is generally a forerunner of a brisk and profitable business. An excellent run of business may come first, and the bad luck afterwards, or vice versa, but the misfortune is sure to come in somewhere. ”

“ Many men whose faces are reddened and blotched by intemperance, begotten in the barroom where they have worse than idled away days and weeks of precious time, are often heard to lament over their "bad luck," as if their laziness and intemperance were not the direct cause of their misery. But it is not often that the diligent experience "bad luck." They receive a reward for their labours, and thrift and honour attend their steps, according as it is written in the Bible: "The soul of the sluggard desireth, and hath nothing ”

“ This belief in the good or bad prognostications to be derived from dreams about ordure, was very widely disseminated. “Luck, or Good Luck. To tread in Sir Reverence; to be bewrayed; an allusion to the proverb, ‘Sh-tt-n luck is good luck.’”— (“Grose, Dict. of Buckish Slang,” London, 1811.)
“Inasmuch as the sun of morning, or spring, comes out of the dark-blue bird of night, we can understand the popular Italian and German superstition, that when the excrement of a bird falls upon a man it is an omen of good luck. ”

“ It would be an interesting and profitable study to examine how far what is called ill luck or bad fortune is induced by such peculiarities. Accepting this view, "so far from its being strange that failure or success should 'run in families,' it would be inexplicable, and contrary to every natural law and precedent, if it did not do so. ”

“ and for the majority, who are not lofty, there is no escape from sordidness but by being free from money-craving, with all its base hopes and temptations, its watching for death, its hinted requests, its horse-dealer’s desire to make bad work pass for good, its seeking for function which ought to be another’s, its compulsion often to long for Luck in the shape of a wide calamity. ”

“ Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way [pg 305] of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid. ”

“ I say,” cried he, aloud, and turning to me, “you've had to my own knowledge as good as a dozen chances, and you've never succeeded in one of them.”
“It's all true,” said I, sorrowfully.
“Owing to luck, of course,” said he, scornfully; “luck makes a man lazy, keeps him in bed when he ought to be up and at work; luck makes him idle, and gets him plucked for his examinations. I tell you this, sir: I 'd rather a man would give me a fillip on the nose than talk to me about luck. If there's a word in the language I detest and hate, it is luck.” ”

“ True, that is ill-luck amounting almost to tragedy. But there is another kind of unlucky person—and about him I can write from experience, because it is my special brand of misfortune. He is the unlucky person who is unlucky in little things. After all, not many of us back horses, and presently fewer of us than ever will be able to do more in the gambling line than play Beg-o'-my-Neighbour with somebody's old aunt for a thr'penny-bit stake. ”

“ It's my luck.'
"'There are men, Kearny,' said I gravely, 'who pass through life blaming upon luck and chance the mistakes that result from their own faults and incompetency. I do not say that you are such a man. ”

“ But I tell you, man, there is mighty little good trying to buck against Fate, and when Luck once finally lets go of a victim, he's bound to drop straight to the bottom before he stops. That's the sum and substance of all my philosophy, old fellow, consequently I never kick simply because things happen to go wrong. ”

“ God was a whimsical, abstract, mad thing called Luck. As to how one happened to be born--whether a sucker or a robber--was a gamble to begin with; Luck dealt out the cards, and the little babies picked up the hands allotted them. Protest was vain. Those were their cards and they had to play them, willy-nilly, hunchbacked or straight backed, crippled or clean-limbed, addle-pated or clear-headed. There was no fairness in it. The cards most picked up put them into the sucker class; the cards of a few enabled them to become robbers. The playing of the cards was life--the crowd of players, society. ”

“ But for nous autres there only remains the exasperation of Little Things which perpetually "go wrong." The only hope, then, for us is to cultivate that state of despair which can view a whole accumulation of minor disasters with indifference. When you are indifferent to "luck" it is quite astonishing what good fortune comes your way. Luck is rather like a woman—it is, as it were, only utterly abject before a "shrugged shoulder." ”

“ Does luck starve honest labor, and pamper idleness? Does luck put common sense at a discount, folly at a premium? Does it cast intelligence into the gutter, and raise ignorance to the skies? Does it imprison virtue, and laud vice? Did luck give Watt his engine, Franklin his captive lightning, Whitney his cotton-gin, Fulton his steamboat, Morse his telegraph, Blanchard his lathe, Howe his sewing-machine, Goodyear his rubber, Bell his telephone, Edison his phonograph? ”

“ I even doubt if I can be a warning, for when a man is as miserably unlucky as I have proved myself, the natural inference is to regard him as the exception to the ordinary lot of mortals,—a craft fated to founder ere it was launched. It's all very well to deny the existence of such a thing as luck. ”

“ Every reason you have given is absurd. But I have noticed that those who continually dread ill luck and fear it will overtake them, have no time to take advantage of any good fortune that comes their way. ”

“ Fate looks for a head. But we are always judging, ‘that’s not well—that’s not right!’ Our luck is like water in a dragnet: you pull at it and it bulges, but when you’ve drawn it out it’s empty! That’s how it is. ”

“ So is it with certain unfortunates, Luck never favors them. What they have expected and counted on they do not get, it is diverted, it drops round about them on every side, only on them it never falls. ”

“ At first indeed he would try, when the child foretold him his ill fortune, whether it would prove true, and relying upon the mere hazard and turn of the die, he had always, as he observed, a run of ill luck on those forbidden days, as he never failed of good if he chose the fortunate hours directed by the boy. ”

“ Now, there are human beings who, in the great things they say and do, seldom fail of having this great, vague backing. There are others whom the grand current for the most part sets against. It is part of the great fact of Luck—the indubitable fact that there are men, women, ships, horses, railway-engines, whole railways, which are lucky, and others which are unlucky. I do not believe in the common theory of Luck, but no thoughtful or observant man can deny the fact of it. ”

“ It asks us, for instance, what attitude we should adopt towards men who are incontestably unlucky; men whose evil star has such pernicious power that it infallibly brings disaster to whatever comes within the range—often a very wide one—of its baleful influence. Ought we unhesitatingly to fly from such men, as Dr. Foissac advises? Yes, doubtless, if their misfortunes arise from an imprudent and unduly hazardous spirit, a heedless, quarrelsome, mischief-making, Utopian or clouded mind. Ill-luck is a contagious disease; and one unconsciousness will often infect another. ”

“ Was the Gold-Beater's luck going to attend his very vigorous and now virile son? There is no such thing as luck; follow the smoke of the so-called "lucky" and we soon conclude that they earn what they get by sheer force of intense action. ”

“ Was there ever such confounded ill luck? My whole life has been a tissue of ill luck: although I have labored, perhaps, harder than any man to make a fortune, something always tumbled it down. In love and in war I was not like others. ”

“ Well, here’s health and long life and to hell with the jinx.... Hah makes a man of you ... Well I suppose there’s not one of you gentlemen here who hasnt at some time or other taken a plunger, and how many of you hasnt come back sadder and wiser. Another illustration of the peculiar predominance of luck in human affairs. ”

“ Ever in pursuit of the elusive thing called luck, they had found it only in hairbreadth escapes from death, in the cunning avoidance of catastrophe, in devil-may-care leaps in the dark, in all the ways known to men who find the world too small. ”

“ Accident, the intricate web of fate, gives them their fit soil, their heat, their germinating impulse. And the world about them, seeing the fruit of these seeds alone, calls the man good or bad, and thus makes its rude analysis of character, as something set and fixed, stamped upon the soul forever. ”