#Circumstance Quotes

“Adversity makes strange bedfellows.”

“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.”

“The first thing a great person does is make us realize the insignificance of circumstance.”

“Your circumstances do not determine what your life will be; they reveal what kinds of images you have chosen up until now.”

“Circumstances don't create character. They reveal character.”

“In science we have to consider two things: power and circumstance.”

“The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.”

“As Charles Lamb says, there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident, so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by 'circumstances beyond your control' from ever trying to execute them.”

“Circumstance does not make me, it reveals me.”

“The great make its feel, first of all, the indifference of circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions, and subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury; but the higher perceptions find their objects everywhere; only the low habits need palaces and banquets.”

“Circumstance does not make the man. Circumstance reveals man to himself.”

“Hume's doctrine was that the circumstances vary, the amount of happiness does not; that the beggar cracking fleas in the sunshine under a hedge, and the duke rolling by in his chariot, the girl equipped for her first ball, and the orator returning triumphant from the debate, had different means, but the same quantity of pleasant excitement.”

“If there is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don't get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.”

“We make allowance for necessity.”

“If it were a rainy day, a drunken vigil, a fit of the spleen, a course of physic, sleepy Sunday, an ill run at dice, a long tailor's bill, a beggar's purse, a factious head, a hot sun, costive diet, want of books, and a just contempt for learning - but for these. . .the number of authors and of writing would dwindle away to a degree most woeful to behold.”

“Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic, and his trappings will have to serve that mood too.”

“It was involuntary. They sank my boat.”

“The same wind blows on us all. The economic wind, the social wind, the political wind. The same wind blows on everybody. The difference in where you arrive in one year, three years, five years, the difference in arrival is not the blowing of the wind but the set of the sail.”

“Your circumstances may be uncongenial, but they shall not long remain so if you but perceive an Ideal and strive to reach it.”

“A particular train of thought persisted in, be it good or bad, cannot fail to produce its results on the character and circumstances. A man cannot directly choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and so indirectly, yet surely, shape his circumstances.”

“Circumstances do not make the man, they reveal him.”

“Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound.”

“Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.”

“The circumstances which a man encounters with suffering are the result of his own mental inharmony.”

“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.”

“Mind is the master weaver, both of the inner garment of character and the outer garment of circumstance.”

“What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.”

“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances.”

“There is no use saying you chose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up.”

“What's a Sun-Dial in the shade?”