A heart well prepared for adversity in bad times hopes, and in good times fears for a change in fortune.
Horace
A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.
Thomas Carlyle
A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.
Samuel Johnson
All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and you don't win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.
Anita Brookner
Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness, its opposite, never brought a man to the goal of any of his best wishes.
Miguel de Cervantes
Every man is his own ancestor, and every man his own heir. He devises his own fortune, and he inherits his own past.
Francis Herbert Hedge
Friends and acquaintances are the surest passport to fortune.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Fortune knocks at every man's door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.
Mark Twain
I would rather be adorned by beauty of character than jewels. Jewels are the gift of fortune, while character comes from within.
Titus Maccius Plautus
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen
It is easy at any moment to surrender a large fortune; to build one up is a difficult and an arduous task.
Titus Livius
It is more honorable to be raised to a throne than to be born to one. Fortune bestows the one, merit obtains the other.
Petrarch
Many have been ruined by their fortunes, and many have escaped ruin by the want of fortune. To obtain it the great have become little, and the little great.
Johann Georg Zimmermann
To be a well-flavored man is the gift of fortune, but to write or read comes by nature.
William Shakespeare
Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.
William Shakespeare