Life & Wisdom Quote by Bret Harte

Luck, in Bret Harte's hands, isn’t a glittery superstition; it’s a weather system. "The only sure thing about luck is that it will change" sounds like a barroom shrug, but it’s built like a trap: the sentence offers certainty, then immediately yanks it away by defining luck as volatility. Harte turns the most comforting human habit - believing the dice have a memory - into a small lesson in humility.

The intent is practical, almost frontier-philosophical. Harte wrote in and about a world shaped by the Gold Rush, where fortunes appeared overnight and evaporated just as fast. In that setting, luck wasn’t a metaphor; it was infrastructure. A river shifts, a claim runs dry, a stranger hits pay dirt. People didn’t just dream of reinvention, they were forced into it. The line captures that collective whiplash, and it punctures the moralizing that often gets pasted onto success. If luck is guaranteed to change, then today’s winner can’t fully credit virtue, and today’s loser can’t be cleanly blamed for failure.

The subtext is a warning against two seductions: despair and entitlement. Bad luck feels permanent when you’re inside it; good luck feels deserved when it’s paying your rent. Harte’s neat paradox denies both. It’s also quietly democratic in the way 19th-century American optimism can be: the wheel turns, so no position is final. Not because the universe is fair, but because it’s restless.