Accident Quotes - page 23

Fame, we may understand is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such it is an accident, not a property of a man. (Thomas Carlyle)
It is no accident that the Victorian age, the heyday of conventionalism, was the cultural bloom of economic liberalism. View quote
Gunnar Myrdal
I never wanted to write. I just wrote letters home from a kibbutz in Israel to reassure my parents that I was still alive and well fed and having a great time. They thought these letters were brilliant and sent them to a newspaper. So I became a writer by accident. View quote
Maeve Binchy
Accidents and chance are words used by persons who do not think clearly when they attempt to account for certain happenings. Anyone who thinks must be convinced that in a world as orderly as this there is no room for the words accident and chance. View quote
Harold W. Percival
One hardly knows where, in the history of science, to look for an important movement that had its effective start in so pure and simple an accident as that which led to the building of the great Washington telescope, and went on to the discovery of the satellites of Mars. View quote
Simon Newcomb
Here we are at the antipode of automatism [invention from Surrealism] and mechanism, and no less distant from the cunning way of reason. In the action of the machine, in which everything is repeated and predetermined, accident is an abrupt negation.... [the] excess of ink flowing capriciously in thin black rivulets.... this line deflected by a sudden jar, this drop of water diluting a contour – all these are the sudden invasion of the unexpected in a world where it has a right to its proper place. View quote
Robert Motherwell
The history of human knowledge has so uninterruptedly shown that to collateral, or incidental, or accidental events we are indebted for the most numerous and most valuable discoveries, that it has at length become necessary, in any prospective view of improvement, to make not only large, but the largest allowances for inventions that shall arise by chance, and quite out of the range of ordinary expectation. It is no longer philosophical to base, upon what has been, a vision of what is to be. Accident is admitted as a portion of the substructure. We make chance a matter of absolute calculation. We subject the unlooked for and unimagined, to the mathematical formulae of the schools. View quote
Edgar Allan Poe
I might act like it's an accident but the opposite is true. I'm incredibly calculated when it comes to my career. View quote
Eva Mendes
But I've never felt objectified. Nothing you see me do is an accident. View quote
Eva Mendes
I tended to faint when I saw accident victims in the emergency ward, during surgery, or while drawing blood. View quote
Michael Crichton
I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it. (Annie Dillard)
Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort. There must be the will to produce a superior thing. View quote
John Ruskin
All my brothers and brothers-in-laws tell me what a good-hearted guy I am. You don't get to be good-hearted by accident. View quote
Paddy Chayefsky
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. View quote
Paddy Chayefsky
Progress is not achieved by luck or accident, but by working on yourself daily. View quote
Epictetus
With every accident, ask yourself what abilities you have for making a proper use of it. If you see an attractive person, you will find that self-restraint is the ability you have against your desire. If you are in pain, you will find fortitude. If you hear unpleasant language, you will find patience. And thus habituated, the appearances of things will not hurry you away along with them. (10). View quote
Epictetus
Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. It is essentially a written language, and it endeavors to exemplify in its written structures the patterns which it is its purpose to convey. The pattern of the marks on paper is a particular instance of the pattern to be conveyed to thought. The algebraic method is our best approach to the expression of necessity, by reason of its reduction of accident to the ghostlike character of the real variable. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Nobody can rule innocently,' as Saint-Just puts it. And in totalitarianism, the Party becomes again the very subject who, being the immediate embodiment of the People can rule innocently. It is not by accident that the real-socialist countries call themselves 'people's democracies. View quote
Slavoj Žižek
I became an actor by accident. I suppose I figured since I was in musical comedy from the time I was a teenager, I suppose I figured that I'd always been in that world to some extent. View quote
Christopher Walken
Man becomes weak or ill by accident as a consequence of the lack of resources. Even the most severally ill patients must be treated with the aim of restoring their health. View quote
Michael Servetus
Over there you think of nothing but becoming President of the United States some day. Potentially every man is Presidential timber. Here it's different. Here every man is potentially a zero. If you become something or somebody it is an accident, a miracle. (Henry Miller)
I don't watch television, but I saw 'The Office' by accident. I thought it was so sophisticated, the Victorian love story, and so bold. We'd do anything, all of us, to not work in that environment, and then I'm sitting there watching hours of it. View quote
Val Kilmer
I think making a movie or a record, the best things happen by accident - and those end up being the magic. Every time I've followed my gut it's been better than when I've tried to do what I was supposed to do. View quote
Zooey Deschanel
Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation. View quote
George Bernard Shaw
When I was little, I got into a little accident, and it gave me congenital glaucoma in both of my eyes. View quote
Willie Maxwell (rapper)