noun: a very large amount of money
noun: a lot of money
noun: money and success
noun: luck, especially good luck
noun: the things that happen to someone or something and the changing degree to which they are successful
noun: a large amount of wealth or prosperity
noun: your overall circumstances or condition in life (including everything that happens to you) ("Whatever my fortune may be")
noun: an unknown and unpredictable phenomenon that causes an event to result one way rather than another
noun: an unknown and unpredictable phenomenon that leads to a favorable outcome ("It was as if fortune guided his hand")
Keely
"In such fields of research, Mr. Keely finds little leisure. Those who accuse him of "dilly-dallying," of idleness, of "always going to do and never doing," of "visionary plans," etc., etc., know nothing of the infinite patience, the persistent energy which for a quarter of a century has upheld him in his struggle to attain this end. Still less, if possible, is he understood by those who think he is seeking self-aggrandizement, fame, fortune, or glory.
The time is approaching when all who have sought to defame this discoverer and inventor, all who have stabbed him with unmerited accusations, all who have denounced him as "a bogus inventor," "a fraud," "an impostor," "a charlatan," "a modern Cagliostro," will be forced to acknowledge that he has done a giant's work for true science, even though he should not live to attain commercial success. But history will not forget that, in the nineteenth century, the story of Prometheus has been repeated, and that the greatest mind of the age, seeking to scale the heavens to bring down the light of truth for mankind, met with Prometheus's reward." [Keely - Cure of Disease]
Vincenzo Cartari
“Who is good or bad, rules with or without measure. Moreover, they have sometimes made her with a caduceus, with a hat at the end, having two small wings, and with two horns of plenty, which embraced the caduceus.
This painting signified, according to some, that good Fortune almost always accompanies eloquence and doctrine; briefly they have esteemed her as a guarantee.
Eloquence and doctrine: briefly they have esteemed her of such great power that some have said that virtue is of little use without her, and that however much virtue may animate us to high enterprises and to glory, we will scarcely attain them if Fortune does not accompany us, supposing, as the ancients believed, that Fortune is some Deity who has much influence on the affairs of the world, we ourselves not being good and bad Fortune to ourselves, according as we know how to govern ourselves well or badly.
For this cause Seneca writes to his friend Lucilius, and says that those are mistaken who judge that any good or evil comes from Fortune: for although she gives matter and some beginnings to things, which may finally succeed well or badly, yet our spirit can do much more than she, doing things as it wishes, so that it is to itself the cause of either a happy or a poor life.
And for this cause, when we take to evil, of all our misfortunes, we must attribute the fault to our foolishness, and not to Fortune, as the ancients also showed in the image of Occasion, whom some consider the same thing as Fortune.” [Les images des dievx des anciens, c. 1581 by Vincenzo Cartari]
See Also