Quotes About Circumstance

Everything grows out of the soil of contingent circumstance. Convenience, rather than the shibboleth of progress of evolution, is the agent of change. Error and misjudgment therefore play a large part in what we are pleased to call the 'development' of institutions. A body of uses and misuses then takes on the carapace of custom and becomes part of a tradition.

the mere necessity brings with it a dispensation, since necessity knows no law. . . .

that the event would

The opposite of love is evil. You stupid human beings, the whole thing is right in front of you, but on you go, debating whether evil is internal or external, inherent in everyone or created by circumstance...The world is not divided into two. You have evil within you, you contain evil, that's the basic idea. When you open the door, what do you get, the lady or the tiger? Whoops, sorry, you get both, because the lady is the tiger. Doity Toid to the Eel

For instance, if we gaze deeply at the deceptively simple word opportunity, we have a chance to see hidden beauty shining from below, which is the Roman god Portunus, patron of harbors. Seen in this light every new circumstance is like sailing into a strange and distant port, which may offer a haven, if we choose to take refuge.

Both of them sat silent on the moss-covered rock in the slant of sunlight through the old pines and thought how many tiny chances had conspired to bring them to this place. Each of those chances might have gone a different way.

They both sat silent on the moss-covered rock, in the slant of sunlight through the old pines, and thought how many tiny chances had conspired to bring them to this place. Each of those chances might have gone a different way.

he walked away understanding, (...) how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made... on the other hand, how accidental fate may seem when things can never turn out other than they do.

He was struck by how lives diverge and by how powerless each of us is up against the force of circumstance. And where does God figure in this?

Sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you're not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance—the tyranny of contingency—is everything. Chance is what I believed Mr. Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God.

If there isn't any solution, it's not a problem. It's a situation.

I am liking him enough to know that a different time and a different place might have led to a different outcome. But since I'm not planning on leaving this time or place anytime soon, it's not a point worth making.

But the more I live with it, and the more I live in general, the more I realize: We all have days that could alter the course of our lives. Not each and every day, maybe. But a lot of them. Most of them.

It wasn't where they belonged, necessarily. It was just where they ended up.

There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one. —Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

My accident - 15 centimetres right and nothing would have happened; 10 centimetres left and I would not be here.

Lonesomeness, on the other hand, did not depend on circumstance. It was bolted in the heart and seized on a man's weakness, a vise that squeezed all possibility out of time, that crushed hope and rendered meaningless anything tomorrow could offer.

A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.

all the great issues in human life make their appearance on Jane Austen's narrow stage. True, it's only the stage of petty domestic circumstance, but that, after all, is the only stage where most of us are likely to meet them.

There's always a beginning, middle and end though the trick is thinking widely enough to imagine all three in any circumstance.

I flattered myself by thinking that, if faced with such a circumstance, I would respond within the letter of the law; but passion is a strange thing, a thing that warps and twists everything with which it comes in contact.

Cuando tenía doce años quería ser actriz. No he tenido suerte: he sido emperatriz

I had always wanted to write a song called, The Vicious Circle. I always thought it was like, the kids are born there, they grow up there, they die there.

I want them to see that there is no faster way to change your circumstance than to open a great book.