Popular quotes about Accident! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Madame Curie didn't stumble upon radium by accident. She searched and experimented and sweated and suffered years before she found it. Success rarely is an accident.
B. C. ForbesI do not believe that the accident of birth makes people sisters and brothers. It makes them siblings. Gives them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and brotherhood are conditions people have to work at. It's a serious matter. You compromise, you give, you take, you stand firm, and you're relentless...And it is an investment. Sisterhood means if you happen to be in Burma and I happen to be in San Diego and I'm married to someone who is very jealous and you're married to somebody who is very possessive, if you call me in the middle of the night, I have to come.
Maya AngelouI'm usually way more pleased with the stuff that just kinda happens by accident and is no way a pop song. But sometimes the easiest thing for me to write is pop songs.
John Britt DanielWe throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep--it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself.
Michael CunninghamI fell into politics by accident. It was not something I planned. It just happened because I'd done so much reading and work in the community, I was prepared to do the job when the opportunity came along.
Ernie ChambersIllinois then had no legislation providing compensation for accident or disease caused by occupation.
Alice HamiltonThe masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter - perfect in its bud as in its bloom - with no reason to explain its presence - no mission to fulfill - a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist - a puzzle to the botanist - an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man.
James WhistlerThere 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 JacobsIt is absolutely no accident that the peace and reconciliation, and indeed the economic progress, that eluded us generation after generation for hundreds of years, has at last come to pass in an Ireland where the talents of women are now flooding every aspect of life as never before.
Mary McAleeseWar is then not a relationship between one man and another, but a relationship between one State and another, in which individuals are enemies only by accident, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers; not as members of the fatherland, but as its defenders. Finally, any State can only have other States, and not men, as enemies, inasmuch as it is impossible to fix a true relation between things of different natures.
Jean-Jacques RousseauPrivacy, after all, was the most relative of privileges. It was granted us by society under ungenerous conditions, the most fundamental of them that whether for pain or profit, by design or accident, we not call public attention to ourselves.
Diana TrillingWhile photography to Cartier-Bresson is constantly an intuitive process, it is never purely instinctive. It is founded on continuous intellection, on ceaseless consideration during all moments previous to, or preparatory for, the pressing. It does not only operate in the blinding flash of a moment seized; it works all the time. The snatched picture merely cuts across the vein of observable incident or accident which is always beating, whether or not the fingers actually press.
Lincoln KirsteinLet 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 NietzscheThere's no such thing as a mistake--we do it! There's no such thing as an accident--we do it!.
Lester LevensonNow if you can recognize and memorize a grandmaster's game, and you have the respect to understand [Zimbabwean president Robert] Mugabe who has survived past anyone's expectations, and make the simple assumption it wasn't an accident, and you understand why he did what he did, now you're ready to predict ... The key to forecasting is to understand both the constraints nations are under and the manner in which the struggle for power shapes leaders.
George FriedmanThe fact that Abraham Lincoln ever, ever became President is either a freak accident of history... or destiny; God's providence to America.
Bill Oberst Jr.Most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime, but the enemy in this war has been racially defined. Not by accident, the drug war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown - for decades - the people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites.
Michelle AlexanderSince the Columbia accident, the Russian space agency, or the Russian space program, has been literally carrying the load bringing us all the supplies we need on the Progress vehicle, smaller amounts on the Soyuz vehicles.
John L. PhillipsI know I get cold, cause I can't leave things well alone. Understand I'm accident prone. Me, I get free every night the moon is mine. But when the morning comes don't say you love me, don't say you need me. I really don't think that's fair.
Natalie ImbrugliaI didnโt fall in love with James. Falling sounds like an accident. Falling hurts. Iโd fallen in love with Michael, fallen hard like slipping off a cliff and hitting the rocks below. Falling in love was something Iโd vowed never to do again. I chose to love James.
Megan HartI made my first film McLibel independently but only by accident. I tried to get a commission from all the standard TV broadcasters but because they had been sued by McDonald's in the past none of them would commission me so I ended up making it by credit cards and rich boyfriends (I'm joking - about the boyfriends).
Franny ArmstrongGreat discoveries are made accidentally less often than the populace likes to think. Commenting on how an accident led to the discovery of X-rays.
William Cecil DampierNow between the meanings of words and their sounds there is ordinarily no discoverable relation except one of accident; and it is therefore miraculous, to the mystic, when words which make sense can also make a uniform objective structure of accents and rhymes.
John Crowe RansomWithin the world of TV land, into which American life has been reduced as well as reproduced, the phenomenon of the talk show has emerged as a genre located somewhere on the spectrum between coffee klatch and town meeting, or perhaps between the psychiatrist's couch and the crowd scene at a bad accident.
Patricia J. WilliamsWhat has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.
Edward DahlbergHuman intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.
Barbara EhrenreichIf you're injured in an automobile accident, and you sue the driver, you get much more for your injury than if you're fighting for your country. There's a double standard here.
Joseph StiglitzโGod,โ she cried, โwhat is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn't tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you be prepared for that? Everything we can't bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.โ
Djuna BarnesBlogging 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.
Andrew SullivanA 99% Value-at-Risk calculation does not evaluate what happens in the last one percent... This is like an airbag that works all the time, except when you have a car accident.
David EinhornNaturally, Coach Hedge went ballistic; but Percy found it hard to take the satyr seriously since he was barely five feet tall. "Never in my life!" Coach bellowed, waving his bat and knocking over a plate of apples. "Against the rules! Irresponsible!" "Coach," Annabeth said, "it was an accident. We were talking, and we fell asleep." "Besides," Percy said, "you're starting to sound like Terminus." Hedge narrowed his eyes. "Is that an insult, Jackson? 'Cause I'llโI'll terminus you, buddy!
Rick RiordanYou didn't just show up on planet Earth by accident.. You were handpicked by Almighty God.
Joel OsteenI make mistakes, but I am on the side of Good," the Golux said, "by accident and happenchance. I had high hopes of being Evil when I was two, but in my youth I came upon a firefly burning in a spider's web. I saved the victim's life." "The firefly's ?" said the minstrel. "The spider's. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire.
James ThurberTo 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.
George F. R. EllisCoach," Annabeth said, "it was an accident. We were talking, and we fell asleep." "Besides," Percy said, "you're starting to sound like Terminus." Hedge narrowed his eyes. "Is that an insult, Jackson? 'Cause I'll-I'll Terminus you, buddy!
Rick RiordanVulgar prejudices are those which arise out of accident, ignorance, or authority; natural prejudices are those which arise out of the constitution of the human mind itself.
William HazlittIf you read philosophical texts of the tradition, you'll notice they almost never said 'I,' and didn't speak in the first person. From Aristotle to Heidegger, they try to consider their own lives as something marginal or accidental. What was essential was their teaching and their thinking. Biography is something empirical and outside, and is considered an accident that isn't necessarily or essentially linked to the philosophical activity or system.
Jacques DerridaIt is no accident that I made Cartoon Town a simple little village - in many ways it mirrored my home town. And, yes, many of my puppet characters took on some of the more eccentric characteristics of people I knew there.
William JacksonI got hooked into folk music by accident, because that's what white college kids liked when I was a child
Stephen StillsFoolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.
Thomas Carlyle