Accidents Quotes

Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board.

Excellence is never an accident.

An author who enjoys writing may sometimes please other people by accident, but he can never pass on to any one else the zestful thrill he feels himself.

Illness and accidents were mysterious manifestations of the war of the spirits, fought on the battleground of the body.

There is no such thing as an accident. It is all part of a master plan. Play your role as gracefully as you can and relax.

In the great and deep qualities of mind, heart, and soul, there is no change. Homer and Solomon speak to the same nature in man that is reached by Shakespeare and Lincoln. but in the accidents, the surroundings, the change is vast. All things now are mobile--movable.

Instead of that liberty which takes root and growth in the progress of reason, if recovered by mere force or accident, it becomes with an unprepared people a tyranny still of the many, the few, or the one.

There is a certain perfection in accident which we never consciously attain.

I've learned to judge of men by their own deeds; I do not make the accident of birth The standard of their merit.

Every man whom chance alone has, by some accident, made a public character, hardly ever fails of becoming, in a short time, a ridiculous private one.

A President Roosevelt comes only once in a century. I believe God knew and does know of the need of the world at this moment. I don't believe President Roosevelt is an accident in time, or that it is an accident that he is President for a third time. I believe that Franklin D. Roosevelt truly is the voice of liberty in the world.

A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.

To a life that seizes Upon content, Locality seems But accident.

The many-headed multitude, whom inconstancy only doth by accident guide to well-doing! Who can set confidence there, where company takes away shame, and each may lay the fault upon his fellow?

The most valuable discoveries have found their origin in the most trivial accidents.

It's no accident that of all the monuments left of the Greco- Roman culture the biggest is the ballpark, the Colosseum, the YankeeStadium of ancient times.

It is no accident that this homeplace, as fragile and as transitional as it may be, a makeshift shed, a small bit of earth where one rests, is always subject to violation and destruction. For when a people no longer have the space to construct homeplace, we cannot build a meaningful community of resistance.

Not only in sex, but in all things men have moved blindly, have evolved out of slime to dissolve into it when this accident of consequences is over.

Peace is not in itself a dream, but we know it only as the result of a momentary equilibrium--an accident.

It was not by accident or coincidence that the rights to freedom in speech and press were coupled in a single guaranty with the rights of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition for redress of grievances. All these, though not identical, are inseparable. They are cognate rights, and therefore are united in the First Article's assurance.

Intrepidity is an extraordinary strength of soul, which raises it above the troubles, disorders and emotions which the sight of great perils can arouse in it; by this strength heroes maintain a calm aspect and preserve their reason and liberty in the most surprising and terrible accidents.

Sometimes there are accidents in our lives the skillful extrication from which demands a little folly.

The Orientals have another word for accident; it is "kismet,"--fate.

There is no escaping the fact that, even in a great career, sometimes the best advances happen through luck, chance and accident.

The most striking characters are sometimes the product of an infinity of little accidents.

Most people end up owning a business by accident. Therefore, they don't usually have a thought process and a strategic plan in place.

It is impossible to be submissive and religiously patient, if ye stay your thoughts down among the confused rollings and wheels of second causes, as, O, the place! O, the time! O, if this had been, this had not followed! O, the linking of this accident with this time and place! Look up to the master motion and the first wheel.

I 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.

When I'm making records, I don't go in with any intentional [ideas for] cohesion, it just happens by accident. That's the X factor; you can't predict that.

I have this theory that there are two kinds of people in the world, people who stop at a traffic accident and those that just drive by. If I see a traffic accident, I am going to stop. I do notice. I don't think that makes me a good or bad person, or anybody else better or worse.

I never envisioned myself being a film star at all. Most people know that pro wrestling is a little bit of an accident for me. I never really had any real aspirations of being in front of a camera.

There are the people who really, really enjoy being celebrities, and then there are the people who came by it maybe by accident. I'm one of those people who fiercely guards their privacy, so I hate doing interviews.

You get all the puzzle parts together enough to say the puzzle is complete. It's a script. In the process of realizing that, new ideas can come, one way or another. Through a happy accident, they just come to you.

I guess what I always found funny was the human condition. There is a certain comedy and pathos to trouble and accidents. Like, when a driver has parked his car crookedly and then wonders why he has the bad luck of being hit.

It is the task of the scenarist to invent little pieces of business that are so characteristic and give so deep an insight into his creatures, that their personalities clearly and organically unfold before the eyes of the audience so that the latter feel that the actions of these people are contingent upon their characters, that there exists some kind of a logical fate, and that nothing is left to mere accident or coincidence.

Put in hours and hours of planning, figure everything down to the last detail, then what? Burglar alarms start going off all overthe place for no sensible reason. A gun fires of its own accord and a man is shot. And a broken-down old house no good for anything but chasing kids has to trip over us. Blind accidents. What can you do against blind accidents?

It's not an accident that successful people read more books.

Revolution? Unscrew the flag-staff, wrap the bunting in the oil covers, and put the thing in the clothes-chest. Let the old lady bring you your house-slippers and untie your fiery red necktie. You always make revolutions with your mugs, your republic--nothing but an industrial accident.

"In France," Marcel said with wintry dignity, "accidents occur in the bedroom, not the kitchen."

What is the problem of women's freedom? It seems to me to be this: how to arrange the world so that women can be human beings, with a chance to exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways, instead of being destined by the accident of their sex to one field of activity--housework and child-raising. And second, if and when they choose housework and child-raising to have that occupation recognized by the world as work, requiring a definite economic reward and not merely entitling the performer to be dependent on some man.

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.

Every disastrous accident alarms us, and sets us on enquiries concerning the principles whence it arose: Apprehensions spring up with regard to futurity: And the mind, sunk into diffidence, terror, and melancholy, has recourse to every method of appeasing those secret intelligent powers, on whom our fortune is supposed entirely to depend.

A good man will extend his munificence to the industrious poor of all persuasions reduced by age, infirmity, or accident; to thosewho labour under incurable maladies; and to the youth of either sex, who are capable of beginning the world with advantage, but have not the means.

Each religion is a brave guess at the authorship of Hamlet. Yet, as far as the play goes, does it make any difference whether Shakespeare or Bacon wrote it? Would it make any difference to the actors if their parts happened out of nothingness, if they found themselves acting on the stage because of some gross and unpardonable accident? Would it make any difference if the playwright gave them the lines or whether they composed them themselves, so long as the lines were properly spoken? Would it make any difference to the characters if 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' was really a dream?

The histories of the lives and fortunes of men are full of instances of this nature,--where favorable times and lucky accidents have done for them, what wisdom or skill could not.

My only solution for the problem of habitual accidents is to stay in bed all day. Even then, there is always the chance that you will fall out.

A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.

Fame is an accident; merit a thing absolute.

Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the product of art and fancy.

I think by the age of about nine I recognized that there were a lot of different religions, and it was an accident I happened to be born into one of them. If I had been born somewhere else, I would have had a different one. Which is a pretty good lesson, actually. Everyone should learn that.