Quotes About Accident

All painting is an accident. But it's also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

The bike accident caused me to start talking about spiritual truths. This accident - where I faced my own death - compelled me to talk about these truths and try to make a movie about them.

In rehearsal you have a good accident that you can repeat.In the movies if you have a good accident you hope the camera's running.

We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.

It will be difficult to return to racing this weekend after Marco's terrible accident in Sepang but I think it is the best thing we can do to honour him,” says World Champ Casey Stoner. We know we all play a risky game and, even if compared to the past the safety of our sport is much better, unfortunately these kind of events still occur. We will go out there this weekend and try to put on a good show for all the fans and especially in memory of Marco.

It is good sense applied with diligence to what was at first a mere accident, and which by great application grew to be called, by the generality of mankind, a particular genius.

Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.

There is a limit to the application of democratic methods. You can inquire of all the passengers as to what type of car they like to ride in, but it is impossible to question them as to whether to apply the brakes when the train is at full speed and accident threatens.

I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident.

Fame is an accident; merit a thing absolute.

I believe these stories exist because we sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives: the parent who punches instead of kissing, the auto accident that takes a loved one, the cancer we one day discover living in our own bodies. If such terrible occurrences were acts of darkness, they might actually be easier to cope with. But instead of being dark, they have their own terrible brilliance. . . and none shine so bright as the acts of cruelty we sometimes perpetrate in our own families.

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.

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.

Leaders live by choice, not by accident.

Marcuse wrote: "Perhaps an accident may alter the situation, but unless the recognition of what is being done and what is being prevented subverts the consciousness and the behavior of man, not even a catastrophe will bring about the change.".

We may spark something or set something in motion in another person's life by something we've done. Perhaps in a car accident we injure someone. Perhaps as a manager, we fire someone. There are a lot of things that could precipitate something negative in another person's life. But does that make us responsible for everything that follows from it? Is there a statute of limitations?

We've all been there, onstage. You say something you don't mean, you make fun of something on accident but... This wasn't that. This wasn't crowd work. This was a rehearsed set. This was pointed.

My father always used to say, "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger," - 'til the accident.

When I was little, I got into a little accident, and it gave me congenital glaucoma in both of my eyes.

Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous.

It's no accident that most self-help groups use 'anonymous' in their names; to Americans, the first step toward redemption is a ritual wiping out of the self, followed by the construction of a new one.

The greenhouse crisis is the bill coming due for the Industrial Revolution. It's not an accident. It's the logical outcome of our world view - the idea that we can control the forces of nature, that we can have short-term expedient gains without paying for them, that there are no limits to exploitation of the environment, that we can produce and consume faster than nature's ability to replenish.

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.

It was a surprise to me and a happy accident that it was such a skill [natural falsetto] - a latent skill and that there was a way to exploit it. And it was a key to playing great role Frankie Valli in such a huge show.

Comedy crowds - we always want to come out and ask you, 'How you feeling?' We always say that, 'By a round of applause, how do you feel?' Right? 'By a round of applause, how you feeling?' It's the only place in the world that you judge how you're feeling by a round of applause... There's never like a car accident, people all over the ground, people running over - 'Ma'am! Ma'am! By a round of applause, how do you feel? By a round of applause - she's not clapping!

Surely people can now see that it is no accident that he, Obama, sat at the feet of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, that he is mother was a leftist activist and cultural Marxist, that his main early mentor was radical Frank Marshall Davis, that he was a member of the far-left New Party in Chicago, that his main vocation in life has been street organizing and agitation and that he didn't think the revolutionarily, transformative Warren court was liberal enough.

The thing that most people didn't understand, if they weren't in his line if work, was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone forever. The difference was that the rape victim still had to go through the motions of being alive.

People who add value to others do so intentionally. I say that because to add value, leaders must give of themselves, and that rarely occurs by accident.

Lieutenant Governor Paterson - blind, black guy - gets sworn in. First thing he says is, 'By the way, cheated on my wife. Let's just get that out in the open right now.' He didn't need to admit that. He's blind. Could have said it was an accident.

Giving never happens by accident. It's always intentional.

Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.

I didn’t fall in love with James. Falling sounds like an accident. Falling hurts. I’d fallen in love with Michael, fallen hard like slipping off a cliff and hitting the rocks below. Falling in love was something I’d vowed never to do again. I chose to love James.

What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.

I think the corruption of power is very interesting, and I think the idea that power is something that... You know, when people want power, they're a certain individual. When people acquire power by accident, they're different again.

Spike Lee is obviously more stupid than anyone can be by accident.

Beauty comes naturally, but it's hard to be stunning by accident.

So that is how I ended up with those two titles, I like Accidentally on Purpose better - it is how we work in our trade - is it really an accident, or is there a thread of destiny in there? That was the intention, I am not sure I found out.

Living a life that matters doesn't happen by accident. It's not a matter of circumstance but of choice. Choose to live a life that matters.

Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.

Never claim credit for anything. 'Cause you can't righteously do that. There's luck and grace and accident.

We must leave the discovery of this mystery, like all others, to time, and accident, and Heaven's pleasure.

Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word "punctilious" ("attentive to formality or etiquette") comes from the same original root as punctuation.

Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

We did exactly what everybody in the country did, watching it. You entered this state of sort of denials. You think, well, it must have been a tragic accident by an amateur pilot. And then you see the next plane coming.

To make sense of this view (design as opposed to accident), one must accept the idea of transcendence: that the Designer exists in a totally different order of reality or being, not restrained within the bounds of the Universe itself.

I wanted to become a champ - I was surrounded by champs in my family and in my neighborhood - and because of this stupid accident, I lost my opportunity.

[Keeping kosher was] the symbol of an initiation, like the insignia of a secret brotherhood, that set her apart and gave her freedom and dignity. Every law whose yoke she accepted willingly seemed to add to her freedom: she herself had chosen . . . To enter that brotherhood. Her Judaism was no longer a stigma, a meaningless accident of birth from which she could escape . . . It had become a distinction, the essence of her self-hood, what she was, what she wanted to be, not merely what she happened to be.