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21 " You probably think that being a guest in your aunt's house I would hesitate to butter you all over the front lawn and dance on the fragments in hobnailed boots, but you are mistaken. It would be a genuine pleasure. By an odd coincidence I brought a pair of hobnailed boots with me!' So saying, and recognising a good exit line when he saw one, he strode out, and after an interval of tense meditation I followed him. (Spode to Wooster) "
― P.G. Wodehouse , Jeeves and Wooster Omnibus: The Mating Season / The Code of the Woosters / Right Ho, Jeeves (Jeeves, #9, 7, & 6)
22 " Colonization of the world, more often than not by robbery and warfare, spread Christianity into the Americas and other corners of the earth, just as Islam was spread throughout Asia and Africa. lt is not a coincidence that the two most widespread religions in the world today are the most warlike and intolerant religions in history. Before the rise of Christianity, religious tolerance, including a large degree of religious freedom, was not only custom but in many ways law under the Roman and Persian empires. They conquered for greed and power, rarely for any declared religious reasons, and actually sought to integrate foreign religions into their civilization, rather than seeking to destroy them. People were generally not killed because they practiced a different religion. Indeed, the Christians were persecuted for denying that the popular gods existed — not for following a different religion. In other words, Christians were persecuted for being intolerant. "
― Richard C. Carrier , Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism
23 " There’s a drive in a lost soul—in one that is searching for acceptance, companionship, belonging, whatever you want to call it. The slightest coincidence ignites a spark that one hopes will lead to something meaningful. "
― Doug Cooper , Outside In
24 " Stories, no matter how simple, can be vehicles of truth; can be, in fact, icons. It's no coincidence that Jesus taught almost entirely by telling stories, simple stories dealing with the stuff of life familiar to the Jews of his day. Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos. "
― Madeleine L'Engle , Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
25 " But what is the use of the humanities as such? Admittedly they are not practical, and admittedly they concern themselves with the past. Why, it may be asked, should we engage in impractical investigations, and why should we be interested in the past? The answer to the first question is: because we are interested in reality. Both the humanities and the natural sciences, as well as mathematics and philosophy, have the impractical outlook of what the ancients called vita contemplativa as opposed to vita activa. But is the contemplative life less real or, to be more precise, is its contribution to what we call reality less important, than that of the active life? The man who takes a paper dollar in exchange for twenty-five apples commits an act of faith, and subjects himself to a theoretical doctrine, as did the mediaeval man who paid for indulgence. The man who is run over by an automobile is run over by mathematics, physics and chemistry. For he who leads the contemplative life cannot help influencing the active, just as he cannot prevent the active life from influencing his thought. Philosophical and psychological theories, historical doctrines and all sorts of speculations and discoveries, have changed, and keep changing, the lives of countless millions. Even he who merely transmits knowledge or learning participates, in his modest way, in the process of shaping reality - of which fact the enemies of humanism are perhaps more keenly aware than its friends. It is impossible to conceive of our world in terms of action alone. Only in God is there a " Coincidence of Act and Thought" as the scholastics put it. Our reality can only be understood as an interpenetration of these two. "
26 " It is no coincidence that, on all four sides, in all four corners, the borders of the Roman Empire stopped where wine could no longer be made. "
― Neel Burton
27 " In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one. "
― Elizabeth Kolbert , The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
28 " This was trail magic. Sea Breeze’s fire, his light, his heat, his life, remained, their salvation. It is a fact that all drainages, if followed downhill, lead to the same lowland water body. Lost and fallen hikers follow drainages down because walking ridges is harder. And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path – the one, natural, trodden way. It isn’t a coincidence that Sea Breeze, Brandon Day and Gina Allen, and countless other hikers all wandered, lost, down the same steep slope to nowhere. "
― Aspen Matis , Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
29 " Regardless of whether luck or coincidence is involved, desires directed in the right way have a tendency to manifest. "
― Stephen Richards
30 " There is no such thing as coincidence in this world. The only thing is hitsuzen.Hitsuzen...A naturally fore-ordained event. A state in which all other outcomes are impossible. "
― CLAMP , xxxHolic, Vol. 1 (xxxHOLiC, #1)
31 " It is no coincidence that Christian fundamentalist movements worldwide seek a return to Old Testament laws - because they fundamentally reject Christ as the New Covenant - which replaced all that.They are not Christians - they are Leviticans. "
― , For Love of Leelah
32 " Maybe it is not a coincidence that, even in heaven, under the perspective of the Bible, there is a hierarchy. After all, what better way to impose the “benefits” of accepting the power of a hierarchy in the human mind? "
― Miguel Reynolds Brandao , The Sustainable Organisation - a paradigm for a fairer society: Think about sustainability in an age of technological progress and rising inequality
33 " It is a matter of mere coincidence that there is often a real individual who corresponds with a celebrity, signifies them. "
― Johnny Rich , The Human Script
34 " Why do things happen the way they do? Is there some kind of order in all this chaos that we just don't see, or is it all, as the mathematically minded people would like us to believe, just random coincidence? If you put one hundred apes in a room, they'll tell you, with one hundred typewriters, and given an infinite amount of time and bananas, one of them would eventually churn out the complete Oxford dictionary. It's all statistical math and probability. The odds of winning the lottery are greater than the odds of getting struck by lightning, but someone wins, don't they? And people get hit by lightning disturbingly more often that you would think. Their point is, eventually all things happen. No matter how philosophically unprejudiced you are, you can't argue with statistical probabilities. But you can certainly give the mathematicians some substantial cud to chew on, can't you? For instance, sure, everything may be eventual from a statistical point of view, but what happens to the formula if you plug in when a particular thing happens? The fortuitousness of the timing? Or combine a particular coincidence with other seemingly non-related coincidences that might have occurred within the same general time frame? We've all had it happen. It's one of our favorite phrases: " Why me? Why now?" Well, when you take the " when" into account, all kinds of very interesting and un-mathematical things begins to happen. The coincidence becomes too coincidental to be a coincidence. "
35 " Is it a coincidence that success follows those who hand out its credit to their parents or teachers. Ironically, the converse is true as well. "
36 " When he finally fell asleep, his dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of a truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come that his parents had always talked about was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world, to come--the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it. "
― Dara Horn , The World to Come
37 " Is it a coincidence that stories from the private life became more popular just as the grand hope for public redemption through revolution was beginning to sour? I witnessed a similar shift in taste in my own time. In the 1960s, while a hopeful vision of a just society arose again, countless poems and plays concerning politics and public life were written, read, and performed. But after the hope diminished and public life seemed less and less trustworthy, this subject was less in style. "
― Susan Griffin , What Her Body Thought: A Journey Into the Shadows
38 " Perhaps it's no coincidence that the word words is an anagram of sword. Well-used words cut through ambiguity and confusion like a sharp sword in the hands of an expert swordsman. "
39 " My goofiest-sounding secret is that I also believe in magic. Sometimes I call it God and sometimes I call it light, and I believe in it because every now and then I read a really good book or hear a really good song or have a really good conversation with a friend and they seem to have some kind of shine to them. The list I keep of these moments in the back of my journal is comprised less of times when I was laughing or smiling and more of times when I felt like I could feel the colors in my eyes deepening from the display before me. Times in which I felt I was witnessing an all-encompassing representation of life driven by an understanding that, coincidence or not, our existence is a peculiar thing, and perhaps the greatest way to honor it is to just be human. To be happy AND sad, and everything else. And yeah, living is a pain, and I say I hate everyone and everything, and I don’t exude much enthusiasm when sandwiched between fluorescent lighting and vinyl flooring for seven hours straight, and I will probably mumble a bunch about how much I wish I could sleep forever the next time I have to wake up at 6 AM. But make no mistake about it: I really do like living. I really, truly do. "
― Tavi Gevinson
40 " I’m not sure about all the particulars that led to this moment. Do I believe life is a series of dots to be connected…or that no one can outrun destiny…or that all roads lead to truth and coincidence is a lie to distract us? The reason I was in this place no longer mattered. The harsh reality stared me in the face and demanded an immediate decision. Walk away and blame it on my age. Or stay and try to help a woman who had slowly become my friend over the last few weeks. "
― Laura Anderson Kurk , Perfect Glass