Al Hirschfeld Quotes

My life is a big accident, so where I end up, I think it's all accidents.

It's luck that one thing works out and one doesn't, it's sort of happenstance.

Careers are what they are, they don't make any sense at all when you look back. We're not in charge of them.

The worst possible turn can not be programmed. It is caused by coincidence.

I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all.

Fate occasionally touches us all in ways we don't always understand.

How accidental our existences are, really, and how full of influence by circumstance.

Fate has a strange way of making plans.

‎Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident

Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions.

As for performing live, I just never imagined how it would work out; for good reason, because it doesn't just work out - not the way you think it will. It's a chance that you take.

People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence.

In the long run, failure was the only thing that worked predictably. All else was accidental.

When you are an historian, there's probably nothing that matters more than to be recognized by your colleagues in your own profession. I was lucky enough to win the Pulitzer Prize for History. I had to give a talk right after that to some young people. The most important thing to tell them, I think, is that you can't ever know that it's going to turn out that way.

Fate laughs at probabilities.

In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.

Nothing is going to happen to me, or you, for that matter. Anything can happen, though. Anything can happen. But most always, just normal things happen, and people have happy lives.

The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dice box in hand, shaking the dice.

But as the unthought-on accident is guilty To what we wildly do, so we profess Ourselves to be the slaves of chance, and flies Of every wind that blows.

That's the way the system works. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you.

I don't believe in fate," she said at last. "But I do believe in...loopholes. I think a lot of what keeps the world going is the result of accidents — happy or otherwise — and taking advantage of these.

Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.

Fate rarely calls upon us at a moment of our choosing.

Life doesn't often turn out the way we think it will, does it?