Quotes About Circumstances

It is hard to know if what you are going to do in life is up to you, or a sum of the contribution of others, plus the circumstances you are born into.

Life's values originate in circumstances over which the individual has no control.

It is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an interruption of the audience on to the stage, and all our carefully planned gesture mean nothing, or mean too much.

The difference is goals. People with goals succeed because they know where they're going. It's that simple. Failures, on the other hand, believe that their lives are shaped by circumstances … by things that happen to them … by exterior forces.

Many of this generation, such as Clair, sacrificed dreams of what they wanted to do, in order to do what they had to do for a living. I wonder how many of us, or our descendants, would be able to do so well under such trying circumstances.

Self-perception theory (Bem, 1967, 1972) argues that dissonance effects were not the result of motivation to reduce the psychological discomfort produced by cognitive dissonance but were due to a nonmotivational process whereby persons merely inferred their attitudes from their behavior and the circumstances under which the behavior occurred.

rejected the life everyone expected of him. "My luck was running out," he said in a 1984 interview for The Paris Review. "I was going to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed.

Hain't life woth livin', Uncle Jabez?" she asked. He laughed a short, harsh laugh and fell silent. "Waal, I dunno, Judy," he said at last, meditatively shifting his quid of tobacco. "I reckon it makes a big diff'rence who you live it with an' a bigger diff'rence yet what work yuh lay yer hand to. Both o' them things, as I see it, is a matter of luck.

Well, when you write about people of a certain age ... we are in a postsexual situation. If I write about younger people then I write sexually, because their drive is sexual. It depends upon the circumstances.

Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident -- the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.

Turn right, turn left, repeat as necessary.

Law of the Alibi: If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the very next morning you will have a flat tire.

These people don't bring delinquency with them; they become delinquent when they're faced with certain situations here.

A library, no mater how humble or grand, is a series of sacred gateways. You pass through them and leave your own city behind; you journey through time and space; and for a little while, you escape the confines of your own circumstances. Each of us who are readers gets to live through a multiplicity of eras; we get to tiptoe through, to borrow Jorge Luis Borge's phrase, 'a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent, and parallel times.

because I believe that each generation should have a chance to see a giant figure of the past from the perspective of its own time and circumstances.

There are exceptional schools in many of our most disadvantaged neighborhoods throughout the Commonwealth. Proving they can get it done for kids, no matter what their circumstances.

It is madness to make fortune the mistress of events, because by herself she is nothing and is ruled by prudence.

'Breaking Bad' is great at blurring the line between good and evil. It makes you feel compassion for Walter White so you're with him throughout this descent into the darker parts of his psyche. The bad that we're capable of is all circumstantial.

At that time we were very definitely told that under no circumstances should there be any secret chapters or any other secrecy in the life of the Party, but that everything should be done publicly.

My mother's feeling about men in general were always a bit of a mystery to me. She had difficulties in Puerto Rico with the men in her life. Her brothers abused her. It's very easy to be judgmental, but more often than not, there are mitigating circumstances, and children are not usually aware of those.

There's so many things that people do on a daily basis that they do as a way of defining who they are. But really, what defines who you are is when circumstances push you to the edge.

I don't blame anyone but myself for the kind of parts I got. To blame external circumstances is absolute folly.

I was born on the back foot and have to play with the cards I have been dealt.

I am the one to admit that I didn't put the ball where it needed to be all the time. But, you know, given the circumstances that we had in Wyoming, we won two back-to-back eight-win seasons. It was a place where we ended up winning football games.