Wagers Quotes

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists. ~ Blaise Pascal

Generally, a betting system for which each wager depends only on present resources and present probability of success is known as a Markov betting system. ~ Richard Arnold Epstein

Courtiers don't take wagers against the king's skill. There is the deadly danger of winning. ~ Isaac Asimov

Only a fool wagers with his master. ~ Stephen Brooke

Faith is a free surrenderand a joyous wager on the unseen, unknown, untested goodness of God. ~ Martin Luther

I had become a bit annoyed with Fermi . . . when he suddenly offered to take wagers from his fellow scientists on whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world. ~ Richard Rhodes

Men made wagers with their judgment, their allegiances, their resources. ~ Guy Gavriel Kay

To marry a woman you love and who loves you is to lay a wager with her as to who will stop loving the other first. ~ Alfred Capus

In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events. ~ Nadine Gordimer

I could leave the world with today in my eyes. ~ Truman Capote

Camped somewhere deep in an impenetrable crag of the immense Powder River Country during the late autumn of 1856, more than likely in the shadow of the sacred Black Hills, one imagines the thirty-five-year-old Red Cloud stepping from his tepee to listen to the bugle of a bull elk in its seasonal rut. Around him women haul water from a crystalline stream as cottonwood smoke rises from scores of cook fires and coils toward a sky the color of brushed aluminum. The wind sighs, and a smile creases his face as he observes a pack of mounted teenagers collect wagers in preparation for the Moccasin Game, or perhaps a rough round of Shinny. His gaze follows the grace and dexterity of one boy in particular, a slender sixteen-year-old with lupine eyes. The boy is Crazy Horse, and the war leader of the Bad Faces makes a mental not to keep tabs on this one. ~ Bob Drury

O Voltaire! O humanity! O idiocy! There is something ticklish in "the truth," and in the SEARCH for the truth; and if man goes about it too humanely - "il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien" - I wager he finds nothing! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

All of life is a wager ~ Christopher Hitchens

Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes. ~ George Santayana

There, at the top of the table, alone amongst all these women, stooped over his ample plateful, with his napkin tied around his neck like a child, an old man sat eating, drips of gravy drbibbling gravy from him lips. His eyes were bloodshot and he had a little pigtail tied up with a black ribbon. This was the Marquis' father-in-law ... he had led a ... Read more tumultuous life of debauchery and duelling, of wagers made and women abducted, had squandered his fortune and terrified his whole family ... Emma's eyes kept coming back to this old man with the sagging lips, as though to something wonderfully majestic. He had lived at court and slept in the bed of a queen! ~ Gustave Flaubert

Wagers and pacts are made with angels - or with devils. ~ Paulo Coelho

If those arrangements [the fundamental arrangements of knowledge] were to disappear as they appeared ... then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. ~ Michel Foucault

Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness. ~ Michael Pollan

I'll wager I would have screwed things up regardless. But ... can you imagine those poor bastards grappling their prey, leaping over the rails, swords in hand, screaming, 'Your cats! Give us all your gods-damned cats! ~ Scott Lynch

There is a deep connection between Bernoulli's dictum and John Kelly's 1956 publication. It turns out that Kelly's prescription can be restated as this simple rule: When faced with a choice of wagers or investments, choose the one with the highest geometric means of outcomes. ~ William Poundstone