Circumstance

Famous quotes containing the word circumstance:

    The historian’s job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.
    Peter Conrad (b. 1948)

    Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.
    Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

    You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?
    Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)