He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.

Accidents happen. Our bones shatter, our skin splits, our hearts break. We burn, we drown, we stay alive.

Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante's hell is the inscription: "Leave behind all hope, you who enter here.

Accidents don't happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.

"If I had to tell you how humans made their way to Earth, it would go like this: In the beginning, there was nothing at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to come out during the day, but there was something so much brighter that seemed to fill up all those hours. The moon grew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife. By accident, because that is the way most things happen, she poked a hole in the night and out spilled a million stars, like a fountain of tears.

They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being "in love", which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.

I never did anything by accident nor did any of my inventions come by accident they came by work.

I never did anything worth doing by accident nor did any of my inventions come by accident they came by work.

Spirit of place! It is for this we travel to surprise its subtlety and where it is a strong and dominant angel that place seen once abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents its habits its breath its name.

My first acting job happened by accident when I was really young. I was in fifth grade and my teacher saw an ad in the paper and took me to the audition after school and I got the part.

There are almost no sports within which mortal accidents are not a reality.

One hardly knows where in the history of science to look for an important movement that had its effective start in so pure and simple an accident as that which led to the building of the great Washington telescope and went on to the discovery of the satellites of Mars.

If Christianity is not scientific and Science is not God then there is no invariable law and truth becomes an accident.

Cruel persecutions and intolerance are not accidents but grow out of the very essence of religion namely its absolute claims.

A relationship is sent by God and accident.

I truly believe that everything that we do and everyone that we meet is put in our path for a purpose. There are no accidents we're all teachers - if we're willing to pay attention to the lessons we learn trust our positive instincts and not be afraid to take risks or wait for some miracle to come knocking at our door.

The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters relationships and themes it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find the accidents of what you stumble across.

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

I've become sort of an accidental advocate for attachment parenting which is a style of parenting that... basically the way mammals parent and the way people have parented for pretty much all of human history except the last 200 years or so.

A beautiful lady is an accident of nature. A beautiful old lady is a work of art.

There will be I think an attempt to grasp again the surprise and accidents of nature and a more intimate and sympathetic study of its moods together with a renewed wonder and humility on the part of such as are still capable of these basic reactions.

When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning not the result of ignorance or accident its children will become the foundation of a new race.