Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Fuller

Chance is the raw weather of life; wisdom is learning how to build with it. Thomas Fuller, a 17th-century English clergyman writing in an era of plague cycles, civil war, and sudden reversals of status, offers a proverb that sounds comforting until you catch its quiet pressure: if chance can be turned, then mere luck is never a complete alibi.

The line works because it splits the world into two forces that people love to confuse. Chance is indiscriminate, arriving without moral logic. “Good fortune,” though, is framed as a product, not a gift. Fuller’s “turns” is the pivot word: it implies agency, craft, even a kind of spiritual carpentry. In a Christian moral universe, that verb carries a sermon’s subtext: providence may set the stage, but character decides whether the moment becomes a blessing or a wasted episode.

Fuller also sneaks in a rebuke to the era’s obsession with fate and omen-reading. Instead of treating randomness as a message to decode, he treats it as material to steward. That’s a very clerical posture: not denying contingency, but insisting on responsibility within it. The wise man doesn’t get more luck; he gets more yield.

There’s a social edge here, too. In a stratified society where birth and patronage looked like destiny, Fuller elevates adaptability as a moral and practical advantage. Wisdom becomes a kind of portable capital: the ability to reframe disruption, to seize openings, to convert accident into outcome. It’s less a Hallmark reassurance than a disciplined ethic for unstable times.