Fortuitously Quotes & Sayings

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Greenspan's eventual explanation for the growing gap between stock prices and actual productivity was that, fortuitously, the laws of nature had changed
humanity had reached a happy stage of history where bullshit could be used as rocket fuel. — Matt Taibbi

Beauty in the European sense has always had a premeditated quality to it. We've always had an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan. That's what enabled western man to spend decades building a Gothic cathedral or a Renaissance piazza. The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human designt, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with with a sudden wondrous poetry ... Sabina was very much attracted by the alien quality of New York's beauty. Fran found it intriguing but frightening; it made him feel homesick for Europe. — Milan Kundera

The basic formulation, or bare-bones mechanics, of natural selection is a disarmingly simple argument, based on three undeniable facts (overproduction of offspring, variation, and heritability) and one syllogistic inference (natural selection, or the claim that organisms enjoying differential reproductive success will, on average, be those variants that are fortuitously better adapted to changing local environments, and that these variants will then pass their favored traits to offspring by inheritance). — Stephen Jay Gould

I'd play the same character for ten years if the words and the moments that I'm playing are authentic. — David Walton

Once I was told that living with me would mean being trapped and slowly asphyxiated. — Jerry Pinto

The boys on the front had magazines with pinups, and they talked about how one day they would score women like that, but they're kids. They don't know what love is. Here they learn what hate is, and I am so sad that they might never know love because hate came first. Maybe they will miss out on having a woman like you, and I feel sorry for them. — A.S. King

So that he seemed not to relinquish life, but to leave one home for another. — Cornelius Nepos

Because the enormous narcissism of their parents deprived Will and Tom of suitable role models, both brothers learned to identify with absence. Consequently, even if something beneficial fortuitously entered their lives they immediately treated it as temporary. By the time they were teenagers they were already accustomed to a discontinuous lifestyle marked by constant threats of abandonment and the lack of any emotional stability. Unfortunately, "accustomed to" here is really synonymous with "damaged by. — Mark Z. Danielewski

Celebrities know I'm not looking for a 'gotcha' moment. I don't want to be Barbara Walters who you come to when you first check out of rehab. I want to be the person who brings a superfan from Iowa to meet you because we love you. — Ross Mathews

You are always in the world. Even in Vagabond. I am not on the road, I am not eating nothing. But in a way we all have a Mona. We all have inside ourselves a woman who walks alone on the road. In all women there is something in revolt that is not expressed. — Agnes Varda

For the first billion years, the universe continued to expand and cool as matter gravitated into the massive concentrations we call galaxies. Nearly a hundred billion of them formed, each containing hundreds of billions of stars that undergo thermonuclear fusion in their cores. Those stars with more than about ten times the mass of the Sun achieve sufficient pressure and temperature in their cores to manufacture dozens of elements heavier than hydrogen, including those that compose planets and whatever life may thrive upon them. These elements would be stunningly useless were they to remain where they formed. But high-mass stars fortuitously explode, scattering their chemically enriched guts throughout the galaxy. After nine billion years of such enrichment, in an undistinguished part of the universe (the outskirts of the Virgo Supercluster) in an undistinguished galaxy (the Milky Way) in an undistinguished region (the Orion Arm), an undistinguished star (the Sun) was born. The — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious effort to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try.
Nero Wolf in Death of a Dude. — Rex Stout

Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry. — Milan Kundera

You can't observe historical events; you can't question historical actors; you can't even know most of what has not been written about. What has been written about therefore takes on an importance that may be spurious. A few lines in a memoir, a snatch of recorded conversation, a letter fortuitously preserved, an event noted in a diary: all become luminous with significance - even though they are merely the bits that have floated to the surface. The historian clings to them, while, somewhere below, the huge submerged wreck of the past sinks silently out of sight. — Louis Menand

The diabolical work that has taken place since the legalization of abortion is that it has destroyed, in those tragic women who have allowed their child to be murdered, their sense for the sacredness of maternity. Abortion not only murders the innocent; it spiritually murders women ... the wound created in their souls is so great that only God's grace can heal it. The very soul of a woman is meant to be maternal. — Alice Von Hildebrand

The Liberals, apparently, want to prorogue the House. They want to run out of town, get out of town just one step ahead of the sheriff. Is the Liberal government committed to staying here as planned throughout the month of November so that it can be held accountable in the House for its actions? ... Now is it true that the government will prorogue the House so that it will not be held accountable for its shameful record — Stephen Harper

The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry ... Unintentional beauty. Yes. Another way of putting it might be 'beauty by mistake. — Milan Kundera

We assume that we can have an exploitive, ruthlessly competitive, profit-for-profit's-sake economy, and yet remain a decent and a democratic nation, as we still apparently wish to think ourselves. This simply means that our highest principles and standards have no practical force or influence and are reduced merely to talk. — Wendell Berry

I was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as an adult, but I don't remember a time when I didn't have them. Back in the 1960s, when I was growing up, my symptoms didn't have a name, and you didn't go to the doctor to find out. — Howie Mandel

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about ... like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees. — F Scott Fitzgerald