quotations about circumstances
Of course, it would be absurd to contend that there can be no connection whatever between a man's inward disposition and his outward circumstances. Just as a body and soul are united in one personality, so also are the dispositions of a man and his circumstances in his single life. If then we often find the vicious man punished by bodily disease, the idle man by poverty, the reckless by ruin, or the trifler by public contempt, this is no more than we might expect. What however is unjustifiable is the assumption that evil dispositions are always followed by such consequences, or that the nature of a man's circumstance is the invariable expression of the character of his soul. On the contrary, we know that sometimes, nay frequently, the ordinary outward results of an evil disposition may not follow, being intercepted by opposing dispositions or beneficent influences.
J. MOORHOUSE
The Cambridge Review, May 7, 1896
Man in the presence of circumstance is like a pianist facing the keys of a piano. On that keyboard the sounds are prescribed for him, but the melodies he can create are infinite.
UNKNOWN
Medical Newsmagazine, 1965
But circumstance is like life; bides and controls; yea, still more is it like death; for, in the end, it sums the result.
WARREN B. OUTTEN
"Man's Inherited Martyrdom: A Fitful Study of Degeneration", The Tri-State Medical Journal and Practitioner, 1898
Like me
It's not your gift to choose
I know you're going to lose
Like me
This futile circumstance
You never had a chance, like me
STONE SOUR
"Red City"
My circumstance is nothing but that which is acting upon me. Neither I nor my circumstance have a being apart; neither I nor my circumstance are "substances." Moreover, neither I nor my circumstance can be accidents of one another, for every accident is an accident of substance.
JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET
What is Knowledge?