Accidents Quotes - Page 33

• The computer needs...even by accident, offers incredible beautiful things that are very seductive. And if you forget about, or if you don't have an idea to begin with, it is very easy to be seduced and that is not a good use of the computer.

  Massimo Vignelli

  Beautiful, Ideas, Seductive

  Source: bigthink.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Success is not an accident. It is sheer hard work. There is no short-cuts. You have to take the stairs and you have to start from the bottom.

  Rita Zahara

  Success, Hard Work, Cutting

  56 Copy quote

• Let us guard against saying that there are laws in nature. There are merely necessities: there is no one who commands, no one whoobeys, no one who transgresses. Once you understand that there are no purposes, then you also understand that nothing is accidental: for it is only in a world of purposes that the word "accident" makes sense.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Nature, Law, Purpose

  7 Copy quote

• If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly.... You are paid for being something less than a man. The state does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wine, Men, Poetry

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.216, Graphic Arts Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Imagination, Poetry, Intelligence

  5 Copy quote

• I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs,
  Those undreamt accidents that have made me
  Seeing that Fame has perished this long while,
  Being but a part of ancient ceremony
  Notorious, till all my priceless things
  Are but a post the passing dogs defile.

  William Butler Yeats

  Forgiveness, Dog, Long

  William Butler Yeats (1931). “Later Poems”, p.96, Library of Alexandria

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Time, whose millioned accidents creep in betwixt vows, and change decrees of kings, tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharpest intents, divert strong minds to the course of altering things.

  William Shakespeare

  Strong, Kings, Mind

  4 Copy quote

• When we consider how much climate contributes to the happiness of our condition, by the fine sensation it excites, and the productions it is the parent of, we have reason to value highly the accident of birth in such a one as that of Virginia.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Virginia, Parent, Climate

  Thomas Jefferson, Jerry Holmes (2002). “Thomas Jefferson: A Chronology of His Thoughts”, p.126, Rowman & Littlefield

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think by the age of about nine I recognized that there were a lot of different religions, and it was an accident I happened to be born into one of them. If I had been born somewhere else, I would have had a different one. Which is a pretty good lesson, actually. Everyone should learn that.

  Richard Dawkins

  Wisdom, Thinking, Somewhere Else

  "Interview: Richard Dawkins Keeps Making New Enemies". Interview with Isaac Chotiner, newrepublic.com. October 29, 2013.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.

  William Hazlitt

  Funny, Art, Growth

  William Hazlitt (1841). “Lectures on the English Comic Writers”, p.23

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Fame is an accident; merit a thing absolute.

  Herman Melville

  Merit, Fame, Absolutes

  Herman Melville (1855). “Mardi: And a Voyage Thither”, p.93

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Men, Ideas, Opposites

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1913*). “Golden Hours with Samuel Taylor Coleridge”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• My only solution for the problem of habitual accidents is to stay in bed all day. Even then, there is always the chance that you will fall out.

  Robert Benchley

  Fall, Bed, Chance

  'Safety Second' in 'Chips off the old Benchley' (1949)

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The histories of the lives and fortunes of men are full of instances of this nature,--where favorable times and lucky accidents have done for them, what wisdom or skill could not.

  Laurence Sterne

  Men, Skills, Luck

  Laurence Sterne (1873). “The Works of Laurence Sterne ...: With a Life of the Author”, p.90, London : Bickers, H. Sotheran

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Each religion is a brave guess at the authorship of Hamlet. Yet, as far as the play goes, does it make any difference whether Shakespeare or Bacon wrote it? Would it make any difference to the actors if their parts happened out of nothingness, if they found themselves acting on the stage because of some gross and unpardonable accident? Would it make any difference if the playwright gave them the lines or whether they composed them themselves, so long as the lines were properly spoken? Would it make any difference to the characters if 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' was really a dream?

  Lewis Mumford

  God, Dream, Character

  "My Works and Days". Book by Lewis Mumford. Chapter 2, 1979.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• A good man will extend his munificence to the industrious poor of all persuasions reduced by age, infirmity, or accident; to thosewho labour under incurable maladies; and to the youth of either sex, who are capable of beginning the world with advantage, but have not the means.

  Samuel Richardson

  Sex, Mean, Men

  5 Copy quote

• Every disastrous accident alarms us, and sets us on enquiries concerning the principles whence it arose: Apprehensions spring up with regard to futurity: And the mind, sunk into diffidence, terror, and melancholy, has recourse to every method of appeasing those secret intelligent powers, on whom our fortune is supposed entirely to depend.

  David Hume

  Spring, Intelligent, Secret

  David Hume (1788). “An inquiry concerning human understanding. A dissertation on the passions. An inquiry concerning the principles of morals. The natural history of religion”, p.374

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• All my brothers, my brothers-in-law, they're always telling me what a good-hearted guy I am. You don't get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you get to be a real professor of pain.

  Paddy Chayefsky

  Brother, Pain, Real

  15 Copy quote

• What is the problem of women's freedom? It seems to me to be this: how to arrange the world so that women can be human beings, with a chance to exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways, instead of being destined by the accident of their sex to one field of activity--housework and child-raising. And second, if and when they choose housework and child-raising to have that occupation recognized by the world as work, requiring a definite economic reward and not merely entitling the performer to be dependent on some man.

  Crystal Eastman

  Sex, Children, Exercise

  12 Copy quote

• "In France," Marcel said with wintry dignity, "accidents occur in the bedroom, not the kitchen."

  S. J. Perelman

  Funny, Kitchen, France

  11 Copy quote

• Revolution? Unscrew the flag-staff, wrap the bunting in the oil covers, and put the thing in the clothes-chest. Let the old lady bring you your house-slippers and untie your fiery red necktie. You always make revolutions with your mugs, your republic--nothing but an industrial accident.

  Alfred Doblin

  Oil, Clothes, House

  7 Copy quote

• It's not an accident that successful people read more books.

  Seth Godin

  Motivational, Success, Reading

  Seth Godin (2010). “Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?”, p.110, Penguin

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• Put in hours and hours of planning, figure everything down to the last detail, then what? Burglar alarms start going off all overthe place for no sensible reason. A gun fires of its own accord and a man is shot. And a broken-down old house no good for anything but chasing kids has to trip over us. Blind accidents. What can you do against blind accidents?

  Ben Maddow

  Kids, Fate, Gun

  4 Copy quote

• It is the task of the scenarist to invent little pieces of business that are so characteristic and give so deep an insight into his creatures, that their personalities clearly and organically unfold before the eyes of the audience so that the latter feel that the actions of these people are contingent upon their characters, that there exists some kind of a logical fate, and that nothing is left to mere accident or coincidence.

  Ernst Lubitsch

  Eye, Character, Fate

  8 Copy quote

• I guess what I always found funny was the human condition. There is a certain comedy and pathos to trouble and accidents. Like, when a driver has parked his car crookedly and then wonders why he has the bad luck of being hit.

  John Prine

  Country, Car, Luck

  31 Copy quote