Quotes About Fortuity

This country seems able to do more by accident than any other country can do on purpose.—Employee at Bechtel-McCone B-29 modification plant, Birmingham, Alabama, 1943

Every job I've ever gotten has been an accident. All the jobs I actually go after, I don't get.

luck, aesthetic luck included, is just the ability to exploit accidents.

Whoever shall review his life will find that the whole tenor of his conduct has been determined by some accident of no apparent moment.

Coincidence doesn't happen a third time.

Margaret Peterson Haddix

It was a fluke. But then, life is.

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

Rolf van der Berg was the right man, in the right place, at the right time; no other combination would have worked. Which, of course, is how much of history is made.

In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes' bath and Newton's apple, the [3.6 million year old] fossil footprints were eventually noticed one evening in September 1976 by the paleontologist Andrew Hill, who fell while avoiding a ball of elephant dung hurled at him by the ecologist David Western.

Pretty nearly any stroke of fate can be made to look like a funny coincidence if you try hard enough and wait long enough.

A series of accidents creates a positively lighthearted state.

Films are something that happened by chance.

and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time.

Films are all luck and anarchy.

However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.

Most of the things that have happened in my life have been pretty arbitrary. I walk into a room, and someone hits me with a two-by-four, and that changes my life. I'm not sure what I've learned from anything.

The sweet accident of coincidence is the best foundation on which to build.

I totally believe in opportunities. I don't believe in accidents. I just don't.

Accidents did not just happen. From time to time they were carefully plotted, calculated, and arranged to one's advantage-all, of course, under the cloak of happenstance.

Non per vendetta, mai per stupore, tutt'al più per caso.

Accident in history is rife; unintended consequences and perverse outcomes are the rule.

endangered joy of serendipity

Human life, its growth, its hopes, fears, loves, et cetera, are the result of accidents