Fortuitous Quotes

• That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.

  Jonathan Swift

  Philosophy, Believe, Fall

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• We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

  Carl Sagan

  Animal, Men, Thinking

  Carl Sagan (1973). “Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective”, p.5, Cambridge University Press

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• The happy combination of fortuitous circumstances.

  Walter Scott

  Happiness, Combination, Circumstances

  sir Walter Scott (bart [novels, collected]) (1862). “The Waverley novels. 25 vols.”, p.30

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• Fortuitous circumstances constitute the molds that shape the majority of human lives, and the hasty impress of an accident is too often regarded as the relentless decree of all ordaining fate.

  Olympia Brown

  Fate, Majority, Mold

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• To what fortuitous occurrence do we not owe every pleasure and convenience of our lives.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Pleasure, Convenience, Our Lives

  Oliver Goldsmith (1858). “The Vicar of Wakefield ... Nach Walter Scott's verbessertem Texte durchgängig accentuirt. Nebst ... Noten und einem vollständigen Wörterbuche ... Bearbeitet von Christian Heinrich Plessner ... Fünfte Auflage”, p.201

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• We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.

  Penelope Lively

  Work, People, Links

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Moon Tiger”, p.143, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Nature's fortuitous manifestation of her purposeless objectionableness.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Nature, Science, Admonition

  Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.183, University of Georgia Press

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• However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.

  Eric Hoffer

  Life, Believe, Eye

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• I am enthusiastic over humanity’s extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuity. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Mean, Thinking, Piano

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• Nothing fortuitous happens in a child's world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.

  John Berger

  Children, World, Young

  John Berger (2011). “A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor”, p.122, Vintage

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• It's good to keep in mind that prominence is always a mix of hard work, eloquence in your practice, good timing and fortuitous social relations. Everything can't be personalized.

  Barbara Kruger

  Hard Work, Practice, Mind

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• A wonder then it must needs be,-that there should be any Man found so stupid and forsaken of reason as to persuade himself, that this most beautiful and adorned world was or could be produced by the fortuitous concourse of atoms.

  John Ray

  Beautiful, Stupid, Men

  John Ray (1827). “The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the Creation, etc”, p.36

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• Being non-commercial is never an ambition. Movies come together at different points for fortuitous reasons. You do them as you get the opportunity, as opposed to doing them when you choose to or design to.

  Ethan Coen

  Ambition, Opportunity, Design

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• Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation

  Carl Sagan

  Animal, Men, Creation

  Carl Sagan (1973). “Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective”, p.5, Cambridge University Press

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• Mathematics transfigures the fortuitous concourse of atoms into the tracery of the finger of God.

  Herbert Turnbull

  Atoms, Mathematics, Fingers

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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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• It may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena.

  Henri Poincare

  Science, Differences, Finals

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• Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be.

  Rollo May

  Courage, Creativity, Profound

  Rollo May (1994). “The Courage to Create”, p.35, W. W. Norton & Company

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• It ["The Ancient Mariner"] is marvellous in its mastery over that delightfully fortuitous inconsequence that is the adamantine logic of dreamland.

  James Russell Lowell

  Poetry, Mastery, Logic

  James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton (1904). “The Complete Writings of James Russell Lowell”

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• PLAGUE, n. In ancient times a general punishment of the innocent for admonition of their ruler, as in the familiar instance of Pharaoh the Immune. The plague today . . . is merely Nature's fortuitous manifestation of her purposeless objectionableness.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Time, Nature, Punishment

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.165, 谷月社

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• A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter.

  Henri Poincare

  Errors, Produce, Latter

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• Western civilization, because of fortuitous historical circumstances, has spread itself more widely than any other local group that has so far been known.

  Ruth Benedict

  Civilization, Historical, Groups

  Ruth Benedict (1973). “Patterns of Culture”, p.30, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It was very fortuitous that the show [True Detective] actually spans seventeen years - so as I was getting older on the show, I was gaining weight. When I'm playing fifty, I'm ten pounds heavier! I don't know if they thought maybe I was method? But it actually worked to my benefit.

  Michelle Monaghan

  Years, Getting Older, Gaining Weight

  Source: www.gq.com

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• Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Progress, Littles, Tiny

  "Dinosaur in a Haystack". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "Can We Complete Darwin's Revolution?" (p. 327), 1995.

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• It may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the later. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomena.

  Henri Poincare

  Errors, Differences, Finals

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