circumstances Quotes

“A man is worked upon by what he works on. He may carve out his circumstances, but his circumstances will carve him out as well.”

“Things happen to people by accident … A lot of nice accidents have happened to me. It just happened that I always liked lessons and books, and could remember things when I learned them. It just happened that I was born with a father who was beautiful and nice and clever, and could give me everything I liked. Perhaps I have not really a good temper at all, but if you have everything you want and everyone is kind to you, how can you help but be good-tempered? I don’t know … how I shall ever find out whether I am really a nice child or a horrid one. Perhaps I’m a hideous child, and no one will ever know, just because I never have any trials.”

“Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves.”

“Man is buffeted by circumstances so long as he believes himself to be the creature of outside conditions, but when he realizes that he is a creative power, and that he may command the hidden soil and seeds of his being out of which circumstances grow, he then becomes the rightful master of himself.”

“Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves;”

“The outer conditions of a person’s life will always be found to be harmoniously related to his inner state...Men do not attract that which they want, but that which they are.”

“A man only begins to be a man when he ceases to whine and revile, and commences to search for the hidden justice which regulates his life. And he adapts his mind to that regulating factor, he ceases to accuse others as the cause of his condition, and builds himself up in strong and noble thoughts; ceases to kick against circumstances, but begins to use them as aids to his more rapid progress, and as a means of the hidden powers and possibilities within himself.”

“But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”

“When and where you are born, what your parents did for a living, and what the circumstances of your upbringing were make a significant difference in how well you do in the world.”

“Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.”

“No matter how vital we think the role of leadership in the rise of a mass movement, there is no doubt that the leader cannot create the conditions which make the rise of a movement possible. He cannot conjure a movement out of the void. There has to be an eagerness to follow and obey, and an intense dissatisfaction with things as they are, before movement and leader can make their appearance.”

“Sometimes it’s about playing a poor hand well.”

“Cause I’m go’n die soon? That make me a man, Mr. Wiggins?”

“Suicide only precipitates a darker continuation of the same conditions from which escape was sought. A condition under circumstances so much more painful.”

“As a person thinks, feels, and believes, so is the condition of his or her mind, body, and circumstances.”

“She could not have borne their pity, and their whispered remarks to one another upon her strange situation; though she would almost have faced a knowledge of her circumstances by every individual there, so long as her story had remained isolated in the mind of each. It was the interchange of ideas about her that made her sensitiveness wince.”

“Loneliness, far from being a rare and curious circumstance, is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of man.”

“Good is the enemy of great. Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline.”

“…the death of my mother was the thing that made me believe the most deeply in my safety: nothing bad could happen to me, I thought. The worst thing already had.”

“Rather than ask God to change your circumstances, ask him to use your circumstances to change you. Life is a required course. Might as well do your best to pass it.”

“Embrace all the circumstances that I allow in your life, trusting Me to bring good out of them. View problems as opportunities to rely more fully on Me.”

“Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.”

“Creators understand that their emotions are not necessarily a sign of the circumstances. They understand that in desperate circumstances they may experience joy, and in jubilant circumstances they may feel regret.”

“To the reactive-responsive person it is not acceptable to spend your life on what you love, because what you love is not tied to the circumstances.”

“What do we really want from philosophy and religion? Palliatives? Therapy? Comfort? Do we want reassuring fables or an understanding of our actual circumstances? Dismay that the Universe does not conform to our preferences seems childish. You might think that grown-ups would be ashamed to put such thoughts into print. The fashionable way of doing this is not to blame the Universe -- which seems truly pointless -- but rather to blame the means by which we know the Universe, namely science.”

“Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view.”

“Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.”

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves.”

“She began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. ”

“Foreordain it? No. The man’s circumstances and environment order it. His first act determines the second and all that follow after.”

After being separated by their circumstances they manage to find each other, and reunite.

“Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.”

“Though Harry’s first year at Hogwarts is the best of his life, not everything is perfect. There is a dangerous secret object hidden within the castle walls, and Harry believes it’s his responsibility to prevent it from falling into evil hands. But doing so will bring him into contact with forces more terrifying than he ever could have imagined.”

“Failure is man-made circumstance. It is never real until accepted by man as permanent.”

“Finally, it is worth cultivating moments in life in which we feel immense satisfaction and happiness divorced from our own success or achievements. This happens commonly when we find ourselves in a beautiful landscape—the mountains, the sea, a forest. We do not feel the prying, comparing eyes of others, the need to have more attention or to assert ourselves. We are simply in awe of what we see, and it is intensely therapeutic. This can also occur when we contemplate the immensity of the universe, the uncanny set of circumstances that had to come together for us to be born, the vast reaches of time before us and after us. These are sublime moments, and as far removed from the pettiness and poisons of envy as possible.”

“Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.”

“But it is helpful to remember that our perspective is our world. And our external circumstances don’t need to change in order for our perspective to change.”

“I’ve lived in the Home for a long time, all my life, in fact, because my parents couldn’t keep me when I was a baby. No one’s ever told me why, at least, not exactly. Just something about ‘the circumstances were not right.’ I don’t know what that means.”

″‘Any plans I might have?’ I repeated. If I’d had a different last name, if I’d had a dad who was a dentist and a mom who stayed home, he wouldn’t have acted like the future was something I might have thought about.”

What happened to a man after any of these things, all depended upon the circumstances.