“We are all vainer of our luck than of our merits.”
Source: The Rubber Band
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Rex Stout 30
American writer 1886–1975Related quotes
Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 214
“We make our own luck. And it’s my responsibility to see it’s good and not bad.”
Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988), Chapter 11 (p. 194)
Introduction
The Life of Poetry (1949)
Context: In time of crisis, we summon up our strength.
Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used.
In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all our need, our need for each other and our need for our selves. We call up, with all the strength of summoning we have, our fullness.
"That Good Wine Needs No Bush".
Sketches from Life (1846)
“If great renown is won by true merit, and if virtue is considered in itself and apart from success, then all that we praise in any of our ancestors was Fortune's gift.”
Si veris magna paratur
fama bonis et si successu nuda remoto
inspicitur virtus, quidquid laudamus in ullo
maiorum, fortuna fuit.
Book IX, line 593 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia
Lloyd George is portrayed as saying this, as George Nathaniel Curzon was making a complaint against Raymond Poincaré in the Turkish TV series, Kurtuluş (1994), but no prior citation of such a statement has yet been found.
Misattributed
Source: Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Chapter 11 (at page 117)
Reported in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) edited by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 225
1880s