Essay Do We Survive Death? (1936)
1930s
Context: It is only when we think abstractly that we have such a high opinion of man. Of men in the concrete, most of us think the vast majority very bad. Civilized states spend more than half their revenue on killing each other's citizens. Consider the long history of the activities inspired by moral fervour: human sacrifices, persecutions of heretics, witch-hunts, pogroms leading up to wholesale extermination by poison gases … Are these abominations, and the ethical doctrines by which they are prompted, really evidence of an intelligent Creator? And can we really wish that the men who practised them should live for ever? The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident; but if it is the outcome of a deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend. For my part, I find accident a less painful and more plausible hypothesis.
Source: Together is Better: A Little Book of Inspiration
as quoted by K.C. Cole, "A Theory of Everything" New York Times Magazine (1987) Oct.18
Introduction “The Human Bumblebee” (p. xxi)
The Botany of Desire (2001)
Chang Yu-hern (2010) cited in: " NCKU Prof. Yu-Hern Chang Appointed as Chairman of Aviation Safety Council http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/06/03/idUS84305+03-Jun-2010+BW20100603" in Reuters, 3 June 2010.
Discourses on the Condition of the Great
Context: Do not imagine that it is less an accident by which you find yourself master of the wealth which you possess, than that by which this man found himself king.
Gene, on the desire to be Finny.
Source: A Separate Peace (1959), P. 85
“Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.”
Source: The Bridge of San Luis Rey
The Sixteenth Revelation, Chapter 77
Context: Our good Lord shewed the enmity of the Fiend: in which Shewing I understood that all that is contrary to love and peace is of the Fiend and of his part. And we have, of our feebleness and our folly, to fall; and we have, of mercy and grace of the Holy Ghost, to rise to more joy.
Richter is questioning here the 'picture of reality'
Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 87, note 13
