Accidents Quotes - Page 30

• Serendipity... You will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called 'The Three Princes of Serendip': as their Highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.

  Horace Walpole

  Silly, Discovery, Serendipity

  Letter to Horace Mann, 28 Jan. 1754. Coinage of the word serendipity.

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• The path of success in business is invariably the path of common-sense. Nothwithstanding all that is said about "lucky hits," the best kind of success in every man's life is not that which comes by accident. The only "good time coming" we are justified in hoping for is that which we are capable of making for ourselves.

  Samuel Smiles

  Success, Men, Common Sense

  Samuel Smiles (1861). “Self-help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct”, p.255

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• I love books the way I love nature. ... I can imagine now that a time will come, that it is almost upon us, when no one will love books ... It is no accident, I think, that books and nature (as we know it) may disappear simultaneously from human experience. There is no mind-body split.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Nature, Book, Thinking

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• The difference between transformation by accident and transformation by a system is like the difference between lightning and a lamp. Both give illumination, but one is dangerous and unreliable, while the other is relatively safe, directed, available.

  Marilyn Ferguson

  Change, Illumination, Differences

  Marilyn Ferguson (1987). “The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s”, Tarcher

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• When fate has allowed to any man more than one great gift, accident or necessity seems usually to contrive that one shall encumber and impede the other.

  Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Fate, Men, Compensation

  Algernon Charles Swinburne (1968). “The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne: Prose works”

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• How comes it to pass, if they be only moved by chance and accident, that such regular mutations and generations should be begotten by a fortuitous concourse of atoms.

  John Smith

  Generations, Atoms, Mutation

  John Smith, Simon Patrick, John Worthington (1821). “Select discourses”, p.53

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• The perpetual stream of human nature is formed into ever-changing shallows, eddies, falls and pools by the land over which it passes. Perhaps the only real value of history lies in considering this endlessly varied play between the essence and the accidents.

  Mary Renault

  Real, Lying, Fall

  MARY RENAULT (1966). “THE MASK OF APOLLO”

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• Art and accident are one.

  Frederick Sommer

  Photography, Art, Photographer

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• Everything is 'colossalized' - events, fortunes, accidents, climate, conversation, ambitions - everything is in the extreme ... They can't even have a tram run off a line, which in England or France might kill one or two people, without its making a holocaust of half a street full. ... The thing which surprises me is they should still employ animals of normal size; one would expect to see elephants and mammoths drawing the hansoms and carts!

  Elinor Glyn

  Running, Ambition, Animal

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• Accident is simply unforeseen order.

  Novalis

  Order, Unforeseen

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• It is strictly and philosophically true in Nature and reason that there is no such thing as chance or accident; it being evident that these words do not signify anything really existing, anything that is truly an agent or the cause of any event; but they signify merely men's ignorance of the real an immediate cause.

  Adam Clarke

  Real, Ignorance, Men

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• If you go around looking for accidents, asking for them, they can't be called accidents any more.

  Margaret Millar

  Asking, Ifs

  Margaret Millar (2016). “Beyond This Point Are Monsters”, p.64, Soho Press

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• I have noted that, barring accidents, artists whose powers wear best and last longest are those who have trained themselves to work under adversity. Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness.

  Catherine Drinker Bowen

  Adversity, Artist, Treasure

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• There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world's champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world's most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside.

  Jane Jacobs

  Nature, Ideas, Champion

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.445, Vintage

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• Must love be ever treated with profaneness as a mere illusion? or with coarseness as a mere impulse? or with fear as a mere disease? or with shame as a mere weakness? or with levity as a mere accident? whereas it is a great mystery and a great necessity, lying at the foundation of human existence, morality, and happiness,--mysterious, universal, inevitable as death.

  Harriet Martineau

  Love, Lying, Disease

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• It's surely no accident that there are horoscopes in Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Woman, New Woman, Elle and Cosmo ... but not Sports Illustrated, GQ, Esquire, Field & Stream or Guns & Ammo.

  Merrill Markoe

  Sports, Gun, Fields

  Merrill Markoe (1992). “What the Dogs Have Taught Me: And Other Amazing Things I've Learned”, Viking Press

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• There will be ups, there will be downs, there will be sideways. I can just tell you I have been hired, I have been fired, I have been lauded, I have been vilified. I've said some of the most brilliant things that just by accident appeared on my tongue, and I've said some of the dumbest things that you could imagine. But each day - even the day that I knew I was going to be fired - I looked forward to because I've always believed that tomorrow was going to be the best day of my life.

  Michael Bloomberg

  Each Day, Tongue, Tomorrow

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• No teaching that is not based on reason can be tolerated by critical minds, but the belief that an accident of blind force produces this highly organized world is far more fantastic than the theory that a Super Intelligence devised its ordered evolution.

  Alice Hegan Rice

  Teaching, Mind, World

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• It is no accident that on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralization.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Proportion, Blight, Centralization

  "The Road to Serfdom". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Ch. 15 : The Prospects of International Order, 1940 - 1943.

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• No accident of environment or circumstance need cut us off from nature. ... It does not matter how shut in we are. Opportunity for wide experience is of small acccount in this as in other things; it is depth that brings understanding and life.

  Mary Webb

  Nature, Cutting, Opportunity

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• Noble bold is an accident of fortune; noble actions characterize the great.
  [It., Il sangue nobile e un accidente della fortuna; le azioni nobili caratterizzano il grande.]

  Carlo Goldoni

  Noble, Bold Actions, Fortune

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• It's not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades.

  Clarissa Pinkola Estes

  Understanding, Wilderness, Disappear

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• Facility is an obstacle to any creativeness. In any art form. You get a nice effect without effort, sometimes by accident, and you're satisfied; but there's nothing substantial underneath.

  Lilli Palmer

  Art, Nice, Creativity

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• History presents the pleasantest features of poetry and fiction,--the majesty of the epic, the moving accidents of the drama, the surprises and moral of the romance. Wallace is a ruder Hector; Robinson Crusoe is not stranger that Croesus; the Knights of Ashby never burnish the page of Scott with richer lights of lance and armor than the Carthaginians, winding down the Alps, cast upon Livy.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Drama, Moving, Epic

  Robert Aris Willmott (1907). “Pleasures of Literature”

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• Justice seldom happens by accident.

  Patricia King

  Justice, Happens

  Patricia King (1992). “Never work for a jerk!”

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