“Now and then it occurs to one to reflect upon what slender threads of accident depend the most important circumstances of his life; to look back and shudder, realizing how close to the edge of nothingness his being has come.”

—  Upton Sinclair

Section 1
100%: the Story of a Patriot (1920)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Now and then it occurs to one to reflect upon what slender threads of accident depend the most important circumstances …" by Upton Sinclair?
Upton Sinclair photo
Upton Sinclair 50
American novelist, writer, journalist, political activist 1878–1968

Related quotes

Ray Bradbury photo

“From the outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living.”

Ray Bradbury book The Illustrated Man

Source: The Illustrated Man

Alfred Horsley Hinton photo

“He (the photographer) has practically created a new thing out of materials gathered from nature; upon a foundation of fact he has allowed his imagination to build up an entirely fictitious scene, and the truth of the effect will depend upon how far his perceptions have been trained by studying nature at various times, so as to know how things might look under certain circumstances.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Printing the picture and controlling its formation, p. 78

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa photo

“His great novel The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) has certainly enlarged my life – an unusual experience for a life which is well on in its eighties. Reading and rereading it has made me realize how many ways there are of being alive, how many doors there are, close to one, which someone else's touch may open.”

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957) Sicilian writer and prince

E. M. Forster, Introduction to Lampedusa's Two Stories and a Memory (New York: Pantheon, 1962) p. 13.
Criticism

“Though Mitra’s case was different because it was a heart attack, I shudder to think what would have happened if an accident occurs in one of these studios. With no professional medical practitioner in attendance, things became difficult.”

Arin Paul (1980) Indian film director

Interview in Indian Express on Studios of Calcutta http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/actor-kunal-dies-of-heart-attack-while-on-shoot/413868/(2009)

Adolf Eichmann photo

“Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's own need to think.”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

Die Welt memoirs (1999)

Peter Singer photo

“What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.”

Peter Singer (1946) Australian philosopher
J. Howard Moore photo

“How helpless human beings are—in fact, how helpless all beings are! How hopelessly dependent we are upon the past, and how impossible it is to be really original! What the future will be depends upon what the present is, for the future will grow out of, and inherit, the present. What the present is depends upon what the past was, for the present has grown out of, and inherited, the past. And what the past was depends upon a remoter past from which it evolved, and so on. There is no end anywhere of dependence, either forward or backward. Every fact, from an idea to a sun, is a contingent link in an eternal chain.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"The Genealogy of Animals", p. 85
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Physical Kinship

Frank Herbert photo

“Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.”

Frank Herbert book Dune

Source: Dune

Related topics