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Life & Wisdom Quote by Euripides

"Chance fights ever on the side of the prudent"

About this Quote

Luck doesn’t just happen to you; it gets recruited. Euripides’ line, “Chance fights ever on the side of the prudent,” is a neat reversal of the way people like to mythologize fortune as a wild god tossing gifts at random. In his hands, chance becomes a combatant with preferences, a force that “fights” for whoever shows up prepared. The phrasing is quietly provocative: it flatters prudence not as moral purity but as tactical intelligence, the kind that turns uncertainty into advantage.

The intent is practical, almost managerial, but it lands because Euripides is writing out of a culture obsessed with fate. Greek tragedy is crowded with prophecies and divine interventions; characters blame the gods when their plans collapse. Euripides, famously more skeptical and psychologically modern than many of his contemporaries, keeps insisting that human choices matter even inside a universe that pretends they don’t. Calling chance an ally of the prudent smuggles agency back into a fatalistic worldview.

The subtext is a warning aimed at the self-excusing: if you’re repeatedly “unlucky,” maybe you’re also careless. Prudence here isn’t timid risk-avoidance; it’s foresight, restraint, and readiness, the habits that make a random event legible and usable. Chance still exists, but it’s demoted from destiny to raw material.

In context, that’s Euripides at his sharpest: stripping heroic narratives of their alibis, suggesting that the gods might be less decisive than planning, and that tragedy often begins where prudence was skipped.

Quote Details

TopicWisdom
Source
Later attribution: The Little Red Book of Gambling Wisdom (Paul Lyons, 2012) modern compilationISBN: 9781626366411 · ID: bDqCDwAAQBAJ
Text match: 95.00%   Provider: Google Books
Evidence:
... Chance fights ever on the side of the prudent . EURIPIDES ( 480–406 B.C. ) Pirithous ... Almost all life depends on probabilities . FRANCOIS VOLTAIRE , Essays : Probabilities ( 1756 ) Care and diligence bring good luck . THOMAS FULLER ...
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Euripides. (2026, February 20). Chance fights ever on the side of the prudent. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/chance-fights-ever-on-the-side-of-the-prudent-145984/

Chicago Style
Euripides. "Chance fights ever on the side of the prudent." FixQuotes. February 20, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/chance-fights-ever-on-the-side-of-the-prudent-145984/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Chance fights ever on the side of the prudent." FixQuotes, 20 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/chance-fights-ever-on-the-side-of-the-prudent-145984/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

Euripides

Euripides (480 BC - 406 BC) was a Poet from Greece.

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