Top 100 By Accident Quotes
#1. That's still the best reading experience: falling in love with a book I meet by accident.
Alice Hoffman
#2. It's amazing what a woman will read into it if you by accident say, I love you. Ten times out of ten, a guy means I love this.
Chuck Palahniuk
#3. The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero.
Ilya Prigogine
#4. If you fall down, get up and walk again.
If you can't walk, crawl.
If that idea fails, have another one
It doesn't happen by accident.
It takes a lot of hard work.
Dick Clark
#5. You are significantly more likely to die in a car accident, especially if you fail to wear a seat belt, than to be attacked by ISIS. Wear your seat belt
Jessica Stern
#7. It was probably no accident that it was the cripple Hephaestus who made ingenious machines; a normal man didn't have to hoist or jack himself over hindrances by means of cranks, chains and metal parts. Then it was in the line of human advance that Einhorn could do so much.
Saul Bellow
#8. I wanted to become a champ - I was surrounded by champs in my family and in my neighborhood - and because of this stupid accident, I lost my opportunity.
Olivier Martinez
#9. Well, I started conducting kind of by accident. I wanted to give myself a special birthday present for my fortieth birthday, and I was living in San Francisco at the time and I started attending some of the concerts and then simply dropping hints.
Bobby McFerrin
#10. I fell into writing plays by accident. But the reason I write plays is that it's the only thing I'm any good at.
David Hare
#11. And if a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up. I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.
Richard Avedon
#12. Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?
Renata Adler
#13. And when I read, and really I do not read so much, only a few authors, - a few men that I discovered by accident - I do this because they look at things in a broader, milder and more affectionate way than I do, and because they know life better, so that I can learn from them.
Vincent Van Gogh
#14. Death is the handmaiden of the pilot. Sometimes it comes by accident, sometimes by an act of God.
Albert Scott Crossfield
#15. Why does each man kill the thing he loves? ... you killed it by accident. Thinking you were doing something else. It was a cherished vase that broke while you were cleaning it. The phone rang and you dropped it. Shattering, when all you wanted was to keep it safe.
Janet Fitch
#16. I personally do not write highbrow music. If I do, it's by accident.
Gordon Getty
#17. Neither in tailoring nor in legislating does man proceed by mere accident.
Thomas Carlyle
#18. You will, I trust, resemble a forest plant, which has indeed, by some accident, been brought up in the greenhouse, and thus rendered delicate and effeminate, but which regains its native firmness and tenacity, when exposed for a season to the winter air.
Walter Scott
#19. 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.
Anna Brownell Jameson
#20. I got into the movies by accident. When I got an offer, I thought, 'Let's try this, too.' Everything in my life has happened by trial and error. I didn't even think I would win the Miss India title, so where's the question of thinking I'd come this far.
Priyanka Chopra
#21. If the universe doesn't care about us and if we're an accident in a remote corner of the universe, in some sense it makes us more precious. The meaning in our lives is provided by us; we provide our own meaning.
Lawrence M. Krauss
#22. Clary wondered how many boyfriends she'd turned into rats by accident.
-Clary to Isabelle, pg.245-
Cassandra Clare
#23. Good films are not made by accident, nor is good photography. You can have good things happen, on occasion, by accident that can be applied at that moment in a film, but your craft isn't structured around such things, except in beer commercials.
Gordon Willis
#24. The term "flying saucer" seems to have been coined by accident. Arnold told reporters that the nine objects he saw were flat and shiny like a pie pan and that they looked like a little fish flipping in the sun.
Don Lincoln
#25. That night I lay in bed, remembering the moment when her hand touched mine. I wondered what it would be like to have her touch me not by accident, to maybe have her let me touch her.
Alex Flinn
#26. People say to me all the time that I threw some money into some guy's coffee cup [by accident, thinking they were poor]. People do make the same sort of mistake. I've made attempts to volunteer that have been calamitous!
Nicole Holofcener
#27. Sometimes people walk into plays by accident - they don't even know what they're looking at; they just think to give it a chance. That can be the beginning of a long friendship.
Dylan Baker
#28. The balance of this world is not upset by accident. It is not upset by those who blunder accidentally into wrong. Evil comes when those who know better, who have seen the pain they cause, nevertheless cause more pain.
Michael Grant
#29. I started to learn Greek when I was in high school, the last year of high school, by accident, because my teacher knew Greek and she offered to teach me on the lunch hour, so we did it in an informal way, and then I did it at university, and that was the main thing of my life.
Anne Carson
#30. My career has sort of been characterized by taking advantage of the changes in the marketplace, sometimes by design, sometimes by accident.
Colin Callender
#31. Always have a plan, and believe in it. Nothing happens by accident.
Chuck Knox
#32. I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.
Annie Dillard
#33. I made out with a homeless guy by accident. I had no idea
he was really tan, he had no shoes on. I just thought it was, like, his thang, you know? I was like, 'He's probably in a band.
Amy Schumer
#34. By the accident of fortune a man may rule the world for a time, but by virtue of love and kindness he may rule the world forever.
Laozi
#35. We do not suffer by accident. It does not often happen that the interference of friends will persuade a young man of independent fortune to think no more of a girl whom he was violently in love with only a few days before
Jane Austen
#36. A relationship is sent by God and accident.
Fiona Shaw
#37. A weak man is just by accident. A strong but non-violent man is unjust by accident.
Mahatma Gandhi
#38. Facility is an obstacle to any creativeness. In any art form. You get a nice effect without effort, sometimes by accident, and you're satisfied; but there's nothing substantial underneath.
Lilli Palmer
#39. Change should be a friend. It should happen by plan, not by accident.
Phil Crosby
#40. Purity doesn't happen by accident; it requires obedience to God.
Joshua Harris
#41. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.
Thornton Wilder
#42. I'm a singer and a writer first. I started to rap by accident, being playful.
Kesha
#43. There is no beauty like that which was spoiled by an accident; no accomplishments and graces are so to be envied as those that circumstances rudely hindered the development of.
Charles Dudley Warner
#45. Exceptional results arrive only when exceptional people put in exceptional effort. It never arises by accident or good fortune.
Peter Thomas
#46. I got hooked into folk music by accident, because that's what white college kids liked when I was a child.
Stephen Stills
#47. But in answer to your question about the conspiracy angle, I think that any historian worth his salt, and this is where I fault Stephen Ambrose and a lot of these guys who attack me - not all of life is a result of conspiracy by any means! Accident occurs alongside conspiracy.
Oliver Stone
#48. One does not become a master coach by accident.
Daniel Coyle
#49. If we believe, though, in the sovereignty of God, then we believe that we were not born at this time, and in this culture, by accident. If we belong to Christ, then this is our assigned mission field.
Russell D. Moore
#50. I promise," she said softly, biting her lip. "I will never shoot you by accident." I considered her response. "That's less comforting than you'd think.
Joanna Wylde
#51. It was a hateful memory, the sort of memory he would sometimes skirt the edges of by accident as he was falling asleep, his thoughts rolling close to it and then recoiling, burned.
Maggie Stiefvater
#52. My belief is that I wasn't born into Judaism by accident, and so I needed to find ways to honor that.
Ram Dass
#53. Today's children are taught by our culture that we are a cosmic accident. Something slithered out of the primal slime and over billions of years evolved into a human being. We are cousins, ten times removed, to the ape at the zoo eating his own excrement.
Gary Bauer
#54. A service culture doesn't happen by accident. The company is always a reflection of the person at the helm. Their attitude, their values, and their commitment to service excellence will drive the actions of others in the organization. Always has ... always will.
Mac Anderson
#55. A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident counts with us for something more than its independent value.
Walter Pater
#56. Ultravox were the blueprint for what I wanted to do, but I stumbled across them by accident.
Gary Numan
#57. You discover a lot of things on your feet and if you don't have any rehearsal, then anything that happens on the screen is by accident.
Paul Newman
#58. The accidents are things that audiences always remember most, I've found on my own movies. The things that they like the most are the things that were just by accident. So you have to create a situation where nothing but accidents can happen the entire time.
Robert Rodriguez
#59. Often we find a friend, not by accident, by unknown inner attraction and synchronicity.
Debasish Mridha
#60. History only existed in the human mind, subject to endless revision. 'each man kills the thing he loves'-Oscar Wilde. You kill it before it kills you, but he was wrong. you killed it by accident. thinking you were doing something else. shattering, when all you wanted to do was keep it safe.
Janet Fitch
#61. We have found that the values of the constants of nature have not been fine-tuned for life by accident, but that these values are constrained by and logically follow from the fundamental space-time organization of the Cosmic Tree of Life.
Carl Johan Calleman
#62. Life is not always what you expect. But life never happens by accident.
Helen Downing
#63. Precariousness and precarity are intersecting concepts. Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed
Judith Butler
#64. Instead of finding myself in the future, I traveled about fifty metres along the sidewalk at 200mph before finding myself in a bush. When asked by the nurse filling out the hospital accident reports 'Cause of accident?' I stated, 'time travel attempt' but she wrote down 'stupidity'.
David Thorne
#65. We take ourselves way too seriously, and we don't take God seriously enough. It is not by accident that humor and humility come from the same root word. If you can laugh at yourself, you'll always have plenty of good material.
Rick Warren
#66. If they shoot at you, shoot back. If it's one of my people, don't worry about blasting one by accident. Jayne would kill them anyway for endangering you.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#67. Time also was said to be an accident: it "exists not by itself; but simply from the things which happen, the sense apprehends what has been done in time past, as well as what is present, and what is to follow after.
Matthew Moncrieff Pattison Muir
#68. Pride should be reserved for something you achieve or obtain on your own, not something that happens by accident of birth. Being Irish isn't a skill ... it's a fucking genetic accident. You wouldn't say I'm proud to be 5'11; I'm proud to have a pre-disposition for colon cancer.
George Carlin
#69. I believe that You Reap What You Sow. I believe that we don't meet people by accident; everything happens for a reason. I believe that standing for what you believe in isn't an easy thing but it's the right thing to do; be brave to stand for what you believe in even if you stand alone.
Roy Bennett
#70. Nothing I do is by design. It's always the result of a happy accident. I didn't have a career plan. It has just become the way it is. It's all good fun.
Lena Headey
#71. In the era of networks only, I cannot tell you the number of shows that we don't know about that did not survive. They got canceled. But there are a few that survived by accident, because they didn't have anything else to do, and they stayed with it.
Henry Blodget
#72. The thing has already taken form in my mind before I start it. The first attempts are absolutely unbearable. I say this because I want you to know that if you see something worthwhile in what I am doing, it is not by accident but because of real direction and purpose.
Vincent Van Gogh
#73. Not many people can lay claim to having broken Time, and we did it purely by accident.
James A. Owen
#74. The story depicts also the troubled part of the hero's life which precedes and leads up to his death; and an instantaneous death occurring by 'accident' in the midst of prosperity would not suffice for it. It is, in fact, essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death.
A. C. Bradley
#75. 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.
Paddy Chayefsky
#76. Frankly I'm not great with heroin addicts. I tried heroin, but it was by accident. I'm not great with that level of substance abuse.
Michael Stipe
#77. What's wrong with technology is that it's not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart. And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets hated for that.
Robert M. Pirsig
#78. Today the courts are choked with lawsuits brought by people against the New King. When they sue each other as a result of an automobile accident they in fact sue the King, for both parties are likely insured ... Steadily the courts have become clearing-houses for the insurance industry.
Gerry Spence
#80. Men may irritate women entirely by accident, but I believe they infuriate one another wholly by design.
S.E. Grove
#81. You only hit a straight ball by accident. The ball is going to move right or left every time you hit it, so you had better make it go one way or the other.
Ben Hogan
#82. Beauty comes naturally, but it's hard to be stunning by accident.
David Levithan
#83. When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, it was an accident, but when she stepped through the looking glass, it was of her own free will, and a braver deed by far.
Salman Rushdie
#84. Hard work and talent are crucial to success, and intangible qualities like heart and clutch are generally real - but luck is just as important. Nobody gets to the top by accident, but nobody's on top without some pretty phenomenal accidents of fate.
Andrew Sharp
#85. When your ears hear and your eyes see the sin, weakness, or failure of your husband or wife, it is never an accident; it is always grace. God loves your spouse, and he is committed to transforming him or her by his grace, and he has chosen you to be one of his regular tools of change.
Paul David Tripp
#86. A really companionable and indispensable dog is an accident of nature. You can't get it by breeding for it, and you can't buy it with money. It just happens along.
E.B. White
#87. How true it is that our destinies are decided by nothings and that a small imprudence helped by some insignificant accident, as an acorn is fertilized by a drop of rain, may raise the trees on which perhaps we and others shall be crucified.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#88. It is indeed the duty of historians to stress the contrast between
the standards of the past and the standards of the present. Some
fulfil that duty on purpose, others by accident.
Norman Davies
#89. Men are wretched by necessity, and determined to believe themselves wretched by accident.
Giacomo Leopardi
#90. The news of life is carried via telephone. A baby's birth, a couple engaged, a tragic car accident on a late night highway - most milestones of the human journey, good or bad, are foreshadowed by the sound of a ringing.
Mitch Albom
#91. Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities.
Frederick Sommer
#92. It is like a voice heard from another room, singing for the pleasure of the song, and then you know it, too, and through you it moves by accident and necessity down generations. Then, why singing? Why pleasure in it? And why the blessing of the moment when another voice is heard, dreaming to itself?
Marilynne Robinson
#93. Most people end up owning a business by accident. Therefore, they don't usually have a thought process and a strategic plan in place.
Carol Roth
#94. She often thought about the power everybody had to ruin everybody else. You could do it by accident, just by showing up, or you could make the wrong decisions in such small pieces that by the time you realized what you were doing, it was too late.
Rosalie Knecht
#95. Members of the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate are not there by accident. Each managed to get there for some reason. Learn what it was and you will know something important about them, about our country and about the American people.
Donald Rumsfeld
#96. Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.
Sam Harris
#97. When I came here as a child, he would always remove the bullets as soon as he walked in the door. I guess he considered me old enough now not to shoot myself by accident, and not depressed enough to shoot myself on purpose.
Stephenie Meyer
#98. The desire for success is inherent within all of us. It is a part of our nature to want to grow, to improve the quality of our lives. However, nothing improves by accident, it requires conscious attention. When you are being bombarded by negatives, improvement, growth and success are easy to forget.
Bob Proctor
#99. Deep, persistent problems are never solved by accident; they are solved only by people who are obsessed with them and set out to solve them directly.
Lee Smolin
#100. Maybe you should spend a little less time with your thing and more with your gun." "Now that sounded dirty." "Good. I hate being crass by accident.
Brandon Sanderson
