Quotes on Accidents
Accident counts for much in companionship as in marriage. – Henry Adams
How true it is that out destinies are decided by nothing and that a small imprudence helped by some insignificant accident, as an acorn is fertilized by a drop of rain, may raise the trees on which perhaps we and others hall be crucified. – Henri Frederick Amiel
Stardom isn’t a profession; it’s an accident. – Lauren Bacall
To accomplish our destiny it is not enough to merely guard prudently against road accidents. We must also cover before nightfall the distance assigned to each of us. – Alexis Carrel
It is a mortifying truth, and ought to teach the wisest of us humility, that many of the most valuable discoveries have been the result of chance rather than of contemplation, and of accident rather than of design.- Charles Caleb Colton
When it [truth] emerges it often bears out the saying that ‘truth is stranger than fiction.’ A novelist has to appear plausible, and would hesitate to make use of such astounding contradictions as occur in history through some extraordinary accident or twist of psychology. – Liddle Hart
In the cosmology behind psychology, there is no reason for anyone to be here or to do anything… I’am an accident – a result – and therefore a victim… if I’m only a result of past causes, then I’m a victim of those past causes…. or, if you look at it from the sociological perspective, I’m the result of upbringing, class, race, gender, social prejudices, and economics. So I’m a victim again. A result. – James Hillman
The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident. – Charles Lamb
The nature of the work is to prepare for a good accident. – Sidney Lumet
Now and then
there is a person born
who is so unlucky
that he runs into accidents
which started out to happen to somebody else. – Don Marquis
I have an idea that some men are born out of their due places. Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives alien among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search of something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest. – W. Somerset Maugham
You’ll accidentally find in barrows of books wrought-iron lines of long-buried poems, handle them with the care that respects ancient but terrible weapons… – V. V. Mayakovsky
We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life. – A. J. Muste
Did you ever observe to whom the accidents happen? Chance favors only the prepared mind. – Louis Pasteur
I see things written about the golf swing that I can’t believe will work except by accident. – Harvey Penick
That something happened to you is of no importance to anyone, not even to you. The important thing about you is what you choose to make happen – your values and choices. That which happened by accident – what family you were born into, in what country, and where you went to school – is totally unimportant. – Ayn Rand
What reason, like the careful ant, draws laboriously together, the wind of accident sometimes collects in a moment. – Frederick von Schiller
In a start-up society, huge sums can fall on innocent parties, almost by accident. – Bruce Sterling
A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status — all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido (if there is such a thing).
Accidents
Ballard, J. G.
1930 British Author
Accidents, try to change them — it’s impossible. The accidental reveals man.
Accidents
Picasso, Pablo
1881-1973 Spanish Artist
I don’t believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.
Accidents
Wiesel, Elie
1928 Rumanian-born American Writer