Circumstantial Quotes & Sayings

Circumstantial evidence is evidence. — Bernard Goldberg

Clashes should not occur whatsoever. Due to conflicts only have the energies diminished. Regardless of what may happen to the body, do not ever enter into conflicts. The body is not going to go away just because someone says so, or if someone casts a curse on it. The body is under the control of vyavasthit [scientific circumstantial evidences]. — Dada Bhagwan

The Greatest Generation gets too much credit. Those World War II guys, if they had all the shit we have today, they'd be assholes too. It's just circumstantial. It's what you're called on to do that makes you great. We haven't been called on to do anything but buy shit and get fat. — Louis C.K.

Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different — Arthur Conan Doyle

Azerowut, I must tend to an urgently urgent business and a business that is urgent most urgently. Watch over my tent with extreme care and care that is caring in the extreme, and do not, under any circumstantial circumstances, allow anyone and his brother to be within an uncomfortably uncomfortable distance of her door. --Master Kwadile — Michael Joseph Murano

It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time. — Frank O'Hara

There exists a mountain of circumstantial evidence that consciousness survives bodily death. This is the kind of evidence that would stand up in a court of law. Some people believe that science needs better tools to quantify what consciousness is. Perhaps when we discover what consciousness is we will be on the road to providing absolute scientific evidence that there is life after death. — Jean Ritchie

In their censures of luxury, the fathers are extremely minute and circumstantial;89 and among the various articles which excite their pious indignation, we may enumerate false hair, garments of any colour except white, instruments of music, vases of gold or silver, downy pillows (as Jacob reposed his head on a stone), white bread, foreign wines, public salutations, the use of warm baths, and the practice of shaving the beard, which, according to the expression of Tertullian, is a lie against our own faces, and an impious attempt to improve the works of the Creator. — Edward Gibbon

There's overwhelming evidence ... circumstantial and otherwise, to suggest a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. — Mike Pence

No matter what the other person says, then take the bottom line out of it, everything in this world is 'vyavasthit' [result of scientific circumstantial evidences]. So don't tell anyone, 'you did wrong'. Not only should you not say this, you should not even think it. — Dada Bhagwan

'Breaking Bad' is great at blurring the line between good and evil. It makes you feel compassion for Walter White so you're with him throughout this descent into the darker parts of his psyche. The bad that we're capable of is all circumstantial. — Jesse Plemons

The silent workings, and still more the explosions, of human passion which bring to light the darker elements of man's nature present to the philosophical observer considerations of intrinsic interest; while to the jurist, the study of human nature and human character with its infinite varieties, especially as affecting the connection between motive and action, between irregular desire or evil disposition and crime itself, is equally indispensable and difficult." - Wills on Circumstantial Evidence. — Henry B. Irving

And when a woman does fail, she is more likely to believe it's personal - she sucked - while men view it as circumstantial (the business sucked). It's not all bad. Women's fear of failure may prompt them to become better informed; they take the time to read up on their ideas so they can supply evidence. But then of course
there's the feedback loop: People who fear failure are less likely to put forward ideas, to take intellectual risks, and more likely to quit. They tend to avoid new challenges in favor of sticking to what they're already good [at]. — Jessica Bennett

Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence. — George Santayana

I do think opportunity breeds bravery. It's such a competitive profession, no one owes you anything, talent in itself is not enough. I went to drama school with so many great actors who are not doing it anymore and it's circumstantial. — David Oyelowo

There's mud on the floor, cigarettes and whisky on the table, fish on a plate for you and a memory of them in my mind. Hardly conclusive evidence I know, but then all evidence is circumstantial. — Douglas Adams

Success is not a function of individual talent. It's the steady accumulation of advantages. It's bound up in so many other broader circumstantial, environmental, historical, and cultural factors. — Malcolm Gladwell

The U.S. government has known since the early 1990s about Soviet-era smallpox weapons, and collected circumstantial evidence of programs elsewhere. — Barton Gellman

I love working with male actors, and I think there's a tendency to write really interesting characters that would work solely alongside men where they would be in a man's world and have to deal with that, and it creates a lot of interesting storylines. For me, it's kind of circumstantial, but I definitely enjoy it. — Elisabeth Moss

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk. — Henry David Thoreau

David Irving has consistenly applied an evidential double standard, demanding absolute documentary proof to convict the Germans (as when he sought to show that Hitler was not responsible for the Holocaust), while relying on circumstantial evidence to condemn the British (as in his account of the Allied bombing of Dresden). — David Cannadine

You must bear in mind that each law is circumstantial. It does depend on the circumstances. — Robert Greene

As much as we wish God would transfer his focus to more external and circumstantial matters, such as restored health, mortgage payments, and career transitions, God is primarily interested in pulling off an inside job. God is certainly at work all around us, but his primary transforming work is aimed at our minds and hearts. — Ramon L. Presson

If pleasure is a circumstantial enjoyment, happiness refers to a deeper sense of fulfilment not dependent on circumstance, and which is usually accompanied by qualities such as peacefulness, purposefulness and benevolence. Unlike pleasure, which requires situations to be constantly renewed or upgraded, happiness is a state of mind that grows the more we experience it. — David Michie

What can you do? There's the rub. The most important take-home message with diet and health is that anyone who ever expresses anything with certainty is basically wrong, because the evidence for cause and effect in this area is almost always weak and circumstantial, and changing an individual person's diet may not even be where the action is. — Ben Goldacre

We are like a judge confronted by a defendant who declines to answer, and we must determine the truth from the circumstantial evidence. — Alfred Wegener

How you feel right now is about equally genetic and circumstantial, but how you will feel
on average over the next ten years is fully 80 percent because of your genes. — Dean Hamer

The evidence for indicting immunisations for SIDS is circumstantial, but compelling. However, the keepers of the keys to medical-research funds are not interested in researching this very important lead to the cause of an ongoing, and possibly preventable, tragedy. Anything that implies that immunisations are not the greatest medical advance in the history of public health is ignored or ridiculed. Can you imagine the economic and political import of discovering that immunisations are killing thousands of babies? — Frederick Douglass

Who you are is not a biological accident. What you are is not a circumstantial accident. God planned both for you.5 — Linda Dillow

It's circumstantial evidence, like finding a trout in the milk. — Henry David Thoreau

Witness testimony is always flawed. It's better than circumstantial evidence, sure, but people aren't camcorders; they don't record every action and reaction, and the very act of remembering involves chosing words, actions and images. In other words, any witness who was supposed to be giving a court facts is really just giving them a version of fiction. — Jodi Picoult

But I do not want to paint our circumstantial portraits so that we both emerge with enough well-rounded, spuriously detailed actuality that you are forced to believe in us. I do not want to practise such sleight of hand. You must be content only with glimpses of our outlines, as if you had caught sight of our reflections in the looking-glass of somebody else's house as you passed by the window. — Angela Carter

Love is circumstantial; we can love anyone if need be; and losing the one we love is the singular catastrophe. Time does not heal it. Every present moment yearns for even the roughest past. — Andrew Solomon

How well Shakespeare knew how to improve and exalt little circumstances, when he borrowed them from circumstantial or vulgar historians. — Horace Walpole

God said to accept whatever circumstances that come along. Circumstance is a natural thing. In it, 'Do this and don't do that'- should not be there. Circumstances are a 'scientific circumstantial evidence' ['Vyavasthit']. You should 'settle them with equanimity'. — Dada Bhagwan

and that perhaps the circumstantial evidence against him or her is fairly powerful after all. But — James Duane

Circumstantial evidence may not be enough to convict. But it's almost always enough to reveal the truth. Isn't it? — Chris Pavone

With 'Divergent' and 'Insurgent,' there isn't great emphasis on uniformity; it's a vigilante military, the state is in disarray, and there is no reference point for authenticity, so it's just weapons work and circumstantial fighting. — Jai Courtney

It is captivating, isn't it? England has such a great scene of electronic music, and I think that was very prominent in Pusher, and the nightlife was the beat of the film. I feel what is really great about Pusher is that it wasn't about drugs and guns and strippers. That was just all circumstantial. I felt like it was really about people and how decisions and circumstances can change relationships. Something just happens. Everything changes for a reason. — Agyness Deyn

The simple circumstantial narrative (did such a narrative exist) of the ruin of a single town, of the misfortunes of a single family, might exhibit an interesting and instructive picture of human manners; but the tedious repetition of vague and declamatory complaints would fatigue the attention of the most patient reader. — Edward Gibbon

Juries must, of necessity, be governed, in reaching many results through inferences from other facts, by certain laws of nature and human reason. They are often obliged to infer one thing from another, and this, whether that other be a fact direct or circumstantial. — Levi Woodbury

No oak trees without acorns' may be a formally true proposition, but that this acorn did in fact produce this oak tree, there and then, is not a teleological necessity; it is a circumstantial occurrence" (OH 104-5). Because history is what happened, not what must have happened, there is no room in an authentic historical explanation for teleological causes. — Terry Nardin

People are preoccupied only with money. They are looking to see where they can get it from. Hey, why are you looking for it in a 'cemetery'? This worldly life has become like a cemetery. There is no love to be seen in it. The way in which money comes to one is a natural thing. It is (by way of) scientific circumstantial evidences. Why do we have to run after it? If it were to free (liberate) us itself, then it would be very good, right? — Dada Bhagwan

Genius in the poet, like the nomad of Arabia, ever a wanderer, still ever makes a home where the well or the palm-tree invites it to pitch the tent. Perpetually passing out of himself and his own positive circumstantial condition of being into other hearts and into other conditions, the poet obtains his knowledge of human life by transporting his own life into the lives of others. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea. — John Updike

Most of us will have no idea where we are going most of the time. And I know that is unsettling.
But circumstantial uncertainty also goes by another name: Adventure. — Mark Batterson

There is no place for beggary [wanting things from others] in the current era. The law of vyavasthit [scientific circumstantial evidences] is such that one who has decided never to beg, will never have situation to beg. — Dada Bhagwan

Even the clearest and most perfect circumstantial evidence is likely to be at fault, after all, and therefore ought to be received with great caution. Take the case of any pencil, sharpened by any woman; if you have witnesses, you will find she did it with a knife; but if you take simply the aspect of the pencil, you will say that she did it with her teeth. — Mark Twain

Thirdly, and most importantly, American plantations in places such as Virginia, Haiti and Brazil were plagued by malaria and yellow fever, which had originated in Africa. Africans had acquired over the generations a partial genetic immunity to these diseases, whereas Europeans were totally defenceless and died in droves. It was consequently wiser for a plantation owner to invest his money in an African slave than in a European slave or indentured labourer. Paradoxically, genetic superiority (in terms of immunity) translated into social inferiority: precisely because Africans were fitter in tropical climates than Europeans, they ended up as the slaves of European masters! Due to these circumstantial factors, the burgeoning new societies of America were to be divided into a ruling caste of white Europeans and a subjugated caste of black Africans. — Yuval Noah Harari

The sciences that purport to treat of human things
the new scientific storyings of the social, the political, the racial or ethnic, and the psychic, nature of human beings
treat not of human things but mere things, things that make up the physical, or circumstantial, content of human life but are not of the stuff of humanity, have not the human essence in them. — Laura Riding

The humans were sitting cross-legged on the floor in a circle of soldiers, pointing at things and learning more Chimaera words: salt, rat, eat, which unfortunate combination led to Zuzana rejecting the meat on her plate.
"I think it's chicken," Mik said, taking a bite.
"I'm just saying there were a lot more rats around here earlier."
"Circumstantial evidence." Mik took another bite and said, in passable Chimaera and to guffaws of laughter, "Salty delicious rat."
"It's chicken," insisted one of the Shadows That Live. Karou wasn't sure which it was, but she was flapping her arms like wings, and even producing chicken bones to prove it. — Laini Taylor

In this passage we are taught how hateful a thing is calumny in all free States, as, indeed, in every society, and how we must neglect no means which may serve to check it. And there can be no more effectual means for checking calumny than by affording ample facilities for impeachment, which is as useful in a commonwealth as the other is pernicious. And between them there is this difference, that calumny needs neither witness, nor circumstantial proof to establish it, so that any man may be calumniated by any other; but not impeached; since impeachment demands that there be substantive charges made, and trustworthy evidence to support them. — Niccolo Machiavelli

Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening anywhere in the world. If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology - we are quite unable to imagine the contrary ... — Erwin Schrodinger

Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details. — Jorge Luis Borges

In this world we do not have to become the doer, we have to become nimit [an instrument, one of the many scientific circumstantial evidence, not the whole and sole doer]. — Dada Bhagwan

Computer animation is one way to liberate people from their circumstantial gravity, and it is one way to give them mental freedom. — Cai Guo-Qiang

Angua picked out the bottle and looked at the label.
"C.M.O.T. Dibbler's Genuine Authentic Soggy Mountain Dew," she read. "He's going to die! It says, 'One hundred and fifty per cent proof'!"
"Nah, that's just old Dibbler's advertising," said Nobby. "It ain't got no proof. Just circumstantial evidence. — Terry Pratchett

The proponents of UFOs offer up impressive quantities of principally eyewitness data, which although largely subjective and circumstantial in nature, is nevertheless quite intriguing ... Many of the high-quality sighting reports involve certain objective aspects, which, to an open-minded bystander, are quite impressive. — Peter Davenport

All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else's poor decision making. — Joshua Ferris

We begin to understand marriage as the insistently practical union that it is. We begin to understand it, that is, as it is represented in the traditional marriage ceremony, those vows being only a more circumstantial and practical way of saying what the popular songs say dreamily and easily: "I will love you forever"
a statement that, in this world, inescapably leads to practical requirements and consequences because it proposes survival as a goal. Indeed, marriage is a union much more than practical, for it looks both to our survival as a species and to the survival of our definition as human beings
that is, as creatures who make promises and keep them, who care devotedly and faithfully for one another, who care properly for the gifts of life in this world. — Wendell Berry

This is the defining event of my life and you're treating it like it's normal. like it's nothing."
He leaned back, looking up at the sk. "Well, maybe it should stop being the defining event. There's a whole lot more to an average life than something that happened before you were a year old."
I knew that he was right, but it was scary. I looked away because I didn't want him to see how lonely I'd been. It was disorienting to think everything that had defined me for so long was only circumstantial. — Brenna Yovanoff

As I have heard, since my arrival at this place, a circumstantial account of my death and dying speech, I take this early opportunity of contradicting the first, and of assuring you, that I have not as yet composed the latter. But by the All-Powerful Dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability or expectation; for I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet escaped unhurt, although death was leveling my companions on every side of me! — George Washington

My worst fears from jury selection manifested themselves in the verdict. This jury needed someone to tell them exactly how Caylee died. Piecing it together from circumstantial evidence was not good enough for them. They wanted the answers on a silver platter, but we didn't have the evidence to serve it that way. It's not just the verdict that tells me this, but also the manner in which it was reached. The fact that they didn't request any materials to review. The fact that they didn't have any questions for the judge. If the statements that the foreman of the jury made to the media are true, ten of these twelve jurors felt that ninety minutes of deliberation was sufficient to fully weigh, consider, and reject four weeks' worth of testimony that we on the prosecution used to establish that this was first-degree murder. The rest of the thirteen hours of deliberation had been spent trying to convince the two holdout jurors of the decision. — Jeff Ashton

Everything we've seen is deeply disturbing, but we cannot ignore these chondrules. The evidence in favor is conclusive, while the evidence against is circumstantial. — Dan Brown

The existence of homosexuality, not as a circumstantial matter of passing sexual whim, but as a shared condition and identity, raises the intriguing possibility of homosexual culture, or at least of a minority subculture with sexual identity as its base. At the very least, by sympathetic identification with cultural texts which appeared to be affirmative, homosexual people saw a way to shore up their self-respect in the face of constant moral attack, and they found materials with which to justify themselves not only to each other but also to those who found their very existence, let alone their behaviour, unjustifiable. — Gregory Woods

I've done a nude scene and I felt it was appropriate to the storyline and I thought it was done in a respectful way and I felt comfortable doing it. But there are obviously going to be scenarios - not necessarily in this job, but in other jobs to come - where the question will be posed to me 'Will I want to do nude scenes?' and I would have to consider that as its own thing. And not just something to say yes to because I have done so before. It really is circumstantial. — Nathalie Emmanuel

Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau's example. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Stress and bad days seem to empty our hearts and our hands. We think, "I've got nothing . . . or at least very little." But the reality is, you still have a lot going for you. You have circumstantial strengths that become part of who you are through God's power when you need them. And you have a stash that includes your education, your experiences, and most of all a God who loves you and promises to see you through even the toughest times. — Holley Gerth

The challenge of abating one with a genuine ego problem is to not try to put him down. Any and all antagonization, in his mind, is merely compensated for by his own descriptions: his feelings of persecution by the envious and his ideals of worth. Arguably, the genuine ego is more of a circumstantial defense mechanism rather than a steady arrogance in need of starvation. — Criss Jami

We need only circumstantial evidence to fry you. — Mohamedou Ould Slahi

If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my feelings, or for my thoughts. So that, in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain. — Jorge Luis Borges

The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody. — Jorge Luis Borges