Quotes about coincidence
page 3

“Sex is an absinthe whose strength only the strong can stand. In both sexes there are two successive crises, the sexual and the sensual. The first comes at a fixed period … the second generally coincides with the completion of growth. Sometimes, when decline is beginning, a third occurs, which like the first brings with it a condition of sentimentality.”

Remy de Gourmont (1858–1915) French writer

A Virgin Heart (trans. Aldous Huxley), Musson Books, Toronto 1922
A Virgin Heart (trans. 1922)

Sex, Strong, Success

“Hidden or in plain sight, The State is geared toward increasing or maintaining its sphere of influence, never reducing it. Voters are paid lip service, provided their wishes coincide with the aims of this unelected, entrenched apparatus. But when the popular will defies Deep State, that monster breathes fire.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Elon Musk, Et al.: The Corporate Arm Of The Deep State," https://townhall.com/columnists/ilanamercer/2017/06/03/elon-musk-et-al-the-corporate-arm-of-the-deepstate-n2335618 Townhall.com, June 3, 2017 2010s, 2017

“I knew that the library was also the materialization of a certain level of the psyche, even as our world is. Only there, time is laid out like space is here. The windows of the library coincide with definite places in our space-time. In our world, these points of intersection may appear as natural objects, and these correlate with coordination points in your psyche. Moving toward these coordination points in your mind automatically lines up your consciousness to some extent with this other reality, and stabilizes conditions enough to allow for more or less conscious entry and return.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976), p. 41

World, Nature, Reality, Appearance

“What are the fundamental motives that explain the present rivalry of armaments in Europe, notably the Anglo-German? Each nation pleads the need for defence; but this implies that someone is likely to attack, and has therefore a presumed interest in so doing. What are the motives which each State thus fears its neighbors may obey?
They are based on the universal assumption that a nation, in order to find outlets for expanding population and increasing industry, or simply to ensure the best conditions possible for its people, is necessarily pushed to territorial expansion and the exercise of political force against others…. It is assumed that a nation's relative prosperity is broadly determined by its political power; that nations being competing units, advantage in the last resort goes to the possessor of preponderant military force, the weaker goes to the wall, as in the other forms of the struggle for life.
The author challenges this whole doctrine. He attempts to show that it belongs to a stage of development out of which we have passed that the commerce and industry of a people no longer depend upon the expansion of its political frontiers; that a nation's political and economic frontiers do not now necessarily coincide; that military power is socially and economically futile, and can have no relation to the prosperity of the people exercising it; that it is impossible for one nation to seize by force the wealth or trade of another — to enrich itself by subjugating, or imposing its will by force on another; that in short, war, even when victorious, can no longer achieve those aims for which people strive….”

Norman Angell book The Great Illusion

The Great Illusion (1910)

Life, War, People, Fear

“I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some chance that I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you.”

Julio Cortázar book Hopscotch

Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963)

Smile, Understanding, Appearance, Chance

“After Plotinus, says Schassler, fifteen centuries passed without the slightest scientific interest for the world of beauty and art. …In reality, nothing of the kind happened. The science of aesthetics … neither did nor could vanish, because it never existed. … the Greeks were so little developed that goodness and beauty seemed to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life the science of aesthetics was invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten's theory. The Greeks (as anyone may read in Bénard's book on Aristotle and Walter's work on Plato) never had a science of aesthetics.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

Life, Men, Books, World

“He had once felt light on the ground. He used to think his life was an open-ended adventure, he used to give things away, it amused him when the unexpected happened, benevolent coincidences used to bear him along. When had all that stopped?”

Ian McEwan book The Child in Time

Page 103
The Child in Time (1987)

Life, Thinking, Light

“At first we got along very well. Esipova even boasted outside the class that she had pupils who wrote sonatas (I completed Sonata, Op. 1, and played it to Esipova, who took it home and inserted pedaling). But before long trouble began. Esipova’s method of teaching was to try to fit everyone into a standard pattern. True, it was a very elaborate pattern, and if the pupil’s temperament coincided with her own, the results were admirable. But if the pupil happened to be of an independent cast of mind Esipova would do her best to suppress his individuality instead of helping to develop it. Moreover, I had great difficulty in ridding myself of careless playing, and the Mozart, Schubert and Chopin which she insisted on were somehow not in my line. At that period I was too preoccupied with the search for a new harmonic idiom to understand how anyone could care for the simple harmonies of Mozart.”

Anna Yesipova (1851–1914) Russian pianist

Sergei Prokofiev, Autobiography

Home, Search, Understanding, Help

“A scientist ought to have a healthy disregard for coincidences.”

Fritz Leiber book Conjure Wife

Source: Conjure Wife (1953), Chapter 3 (p. 39).

“As every secret policeman knows, there is no such thing as a coincidence; the state has too many enemies.”

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 6, “Telegram from the Dead” (p. 139)

Secret

“If you're in the mood for something that's completely visceral and mindless (really mindless — the plot is a joke, filled with contrivances and coincidences), this movie will fit the bill. Parts of it are excruciatingly bad, but there are numerous examples of well-directed action that, on balance, compensate for the worst gaffes. This is a poor man's Die Hard. It has the explosions, gunplay, and spectacular stunts, but little of the wit and intelligence. In other words, it's a typical summer action flick.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=1556 of Cliffhanger (1993). Two star reviews

Intelligence, Mood, Summer, Parting

“Classification in documentation is a tool for selection. It is essentially a 'finding system' for subject items… It is an artificial language, designed as a tool to aid in the selection of information from a store in response to search questions. The classification serves to standardise subject description, so that the description of a subject used by indexer and inquirer are more likely to coincide, thus maximising the probability of finding all items relevant to an inquiry.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Chapter 1: The need for classification, p. 12-13.

Search, Question

“Frege's pair of concepts (nominatum and sense) is compared with our pair (extension and intension). The two pairs coincide in ordinary (extensional) contexts, but not in oblique (nonextensional) contexts.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Source: Meaning And Necessity (1947), p. 124 as cited in: E. Cornell Way (1991) Knowledge Representation and Metaphor. p. 183

Sense

“Hence, in Thee, who art Love, the lover -is not one thing and the loved another, and the bond between them a third, but they are one and the same-Thou, Thyself, my God. Since, then, in Thee the loved is one with the lover, and being loved [is one] with loving, this bond of coincidence is an essential bond. For there is nothing in Thee that is not Thy very Essence.”

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) German philosopher, theologian, jurist, and astronomer

De visione Dei (On The Vision of God) (1453)

Love, God, Art, Lovers

“Both the law of inertia and the law of gravitation contain a numerical factor or a constant belonging to matter, which is called mass. We have thus two definitions of mass; one by the law of inertia: mass is the ratio between force and acceleration. We may call the mass thus defined the inertial or passive mass, as it is a measure of the resistance offered by matter to a force acting on it. The second is defined by the law of gravitation, and might be called the gravitational or active mass, being a measure of the force exerted by one material body on another. The fact that these two constants or coefficients are the same is, in Newton's system, to be considered as a most remarkable accidental coincidence and was decidedly felt as such by Newton himself. He made experiments to determine the equality of the two masses by swinging a pendulum, of which the bob was hollow and could be filled up with different materials. The force acting on the pendulum is proportional to its active mass, its inertia is proportional to its passive mass, so that the period will depend on the ratio of the passive and the active mass. Consequently the fact that the period of all these different pendulums was the same, proves that this ratio is a constant, and can be made equal to unity by a suitable choice of units, i. e., the inertial and the gravitational mass are the same. These experiments have been repeated in the nineteenth century by Bessel, and in our own times by Eötvös and Zeeman, and the identity of the inertial and the gravitational mass is one of the best ascertained empirical facts in physics-perhaps the best. It follows that the so-called fictitious forces introduced by a motion of the body of reference, such as a rotation, are indistinguishable from real forces…. In Einstein's general theory of relativity there is also no formal theoretical difference, as there was in Newton's system…. the equality of inertial and gravitational mass is no longer an accidental coincidence, but a necessity.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

p, 125
"The Astronomical Aspect of the Theory of Relativity" (1933)

Law, Time, Dependency

“[M]ankind are all formed by the same Almighty being, alike objects of his Care & equally designed for the Enjoyment of Happiness the Christian Religion teaches us to believe & the Political Creed of America fully coincides with the Position.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Petition from the Pennsylvania Society (1790)

Religion, Happiness

“And coincidence convinces the credulous. Two things happen at the same time, or one after another, and we assume there must be a link; well, we sacrificed a virgin last year, and there was a good harvest. Of course the ceremony to raise the sun works—it comes up every morning, doesn’t it? I say my prayers each night and the world hasn’t ended yet…
Dung beetle thinking. Life is too complicated for there not to be continual coincidences, and we just have to come to terms with the fact that they merely happen and aren’t ordained, that some things occur for no real reason whatsoever, and that this is not a punishment and that is not a reward. Good grief; the most copper-bottomed, platinum-card proof of divine intervention, of some holy masterplan, would be if there were no coincidences at all! That really would look suspicious.”

Iain Banks (1954–2013) Scottish writer

“Piece” (p. 75)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

Life, World, Thinking, Time

“It is no coincidence that while some major female artists have married, very few have borne children. The issue is not conservation of energy but imaginative integrity. Art is its own self-swelling, proof that the mind is greater than the body.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 660

Children, Art, Imagination

“Coincidence is a wonderful thing.”

Humphrey Lyttelton (1921–2008) English jazz trumpeter

ISIHAC after Jeremy Hardy came in on time in the round of pick up song.

“The hazardous part of the business is also the mere possibility, still to be admitted, that the ultimate insight into the nature of things attainable by man, into his very being and that of the world, might not coincide exactly with the doctrines which were in part made known to the former little race of the Jews and in part appeared in Jerusalem eighteen hundred years ago.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Das Bedenkliche bei der Sache ist auch bloß die doch einzuräumende Möglichkeit, daß die letzte dem Menschen erreichbare Einsicht in die Natur der Dinge, in sein eigenes Wesen und das der Welt nicht gerade zusammenträfe mit den Lehren, welche theils dem ehemaligen Völkchen der Juden eröffnet worden, theils vor 1800 Jahren in Jerusalem aufgetreten sind.
Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 5, p. 154, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 142
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), On Philosophy in the Universities

World, Business, Nature, Appearance

“His [Marcel Duchamp's] idea was that anything could be art by focusing the mind to think of it as art. My images are similar but at the time my work was first being shown, 1958-'59, I was unfamiliar with Duchamp and Dada. Everyone said my work was Dada, so I read on it, went to Philadelphia to see the Arensberg Duchamp collection, was delighted by it and later met him (Duchamp)... But it was all more a coincidence. Perhaps it’s that certain ideas get into the air, ideas that come out of our living and out of the environment automatically.”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Daily Close-up, after the Flag, Roberta Brandes Gratz, New York Post, 30 December 1970, p. 25
1970s

Art, Idea, Thinking, Time

“Animals themselves cannot plead their cause, and those who plead it for them have no obvious financial or other selfish interest in the issue, although many may have “vested” their emotions in it. When we turn to special gain from maintaining existing practices, special loss if they were to be changed, we find a large number of groups whose views might be discounted. Butchers, furriers, hunters, cattlemen, chicken farmers, scientific experimenters on animals would, unless compensated, all have to suffer significant personal loss if we were to change our practices. They cannot therefore be expected to see the moral issue without the distortion of special interest. The scientists might claim that in their case their own interest coincides with a universal human interest, but I think the butcher and the furrier could make a similar claim[. ]”

Annette Baier (1929–2012) New Zealand philosopher

Source: Knowing Our Place in the Animal World, pp. 63-64

Thinking, Suffering, Universe, Change

“Besides, what difference did if make if there had been two genuine coincidences? The universe was full of them. Every molecular collision was a coincidence. You could pile a thousand coincidences on top of another, he averred, and not get Tom Digby one step nearer to believing in the supernatural. Oh, he knew intelligent people enough, all right, who coddled such beliefs. Some of his best friends liked to relate “yarns” and toy with eerie possibilities for the sake of a thrill. But the only emotion Tom ever got out of such stuff was a nauseating disgust. It cut too deep for joking. It was a reversion to that primitive, fear-bound ignorance from which science had slowly lifted man, inch by inch, against the most bitter opposition.”

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction

“The Hill and the Hole” (p. 165); originally published in Unknown Worlds, August 1942
Short Fiction, Night's Black Agents (1947)

People, Fear, Intelligence, Universe

“As a historian, he understood that what in hindsight were taken to be grand events really consisted of a myriad of tiny, seemingly inconsequential choices. Often as not, great moments hung on coincidences and random luck.”

Lawrence M. Schoen (1959) American writer and klingonist

Source: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard (2015), Chapter 12, “Ancestral Lands” (p. 119)

“Let us suppose that an explosion occurs on Mars, which is observed by an astronomer on earth, who records the instant when he sees the flash. If light travelled instantaneously with an infinite velocity, this instant would coincide with the time… recorded by the… observer on Mars. In this way a meaning could be attached automatically to absolute time and the simultaneity of events at different places; indeed, the classical theory is now regarded as the limiting form of Einstein's theory when the velocity of light becomes infinite. But as there is a mass of experimental evidence supporting the view that light takes a finite time to travel… the terrestrial observer must correct the time recorded on his watch. This correction… will depend on assumptions concerning the velocity of light and the measurement of distance. Thus the concept of a world-wide simultaneity ceases to be a primitive idea.”

Gerald James Whitrow (1912–2000) British mathematician

p, 125
The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology (1949)

World, Way, Travel, Idea

“"Noah is a revolutio of Adam, as Moses is a revolutio of Abel and Seth," says the Kabala; that is to say, a repetition or another version of the same story. The greatest proof of it is the distribution of the characters in the Bible. For instance, beginning with Cain, the first murderer, every fifth man in his line of descent is a murderer. Thus there come Enoch, Irad, Mehujael, Methuselah, and the fifth is Lamech, the second murderer, and he is Noah's father. By drawing the five-pointed star of Lucifer (which has its crown-point downward) and writing the name of Cain beneath the lowest point, and those of his descendants successively at each of the other points, it will be found that each fifth name — which would be written beneath that of Cain — is that of a murderer. In the Talmud this genealogy is given complete, and thirteen murderers range themselves in line below the name of Cain. This is no coincidence. Siva is the Destroyer, but he is also the Regenerator. Cain is a murderer, but he is also the creator of nations, and an inventor. This star of Lucifer is the same one that John sees falling down to earth in his Apocalypse.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume II, Chapter IX

Star, Success, Drawing

“"The Itch" was an accident. I responded to [co-writer] Billy Steinberg's lyric because I thought even though we set it in this particular story of a girl in a relationship who isn't getting what she needs, it's really a metaphor for desire. Everything just coincided without my realizing it. I was playing Lucy in Dracula 2000, and she's a character who is totally open, sexual and curious and definitely has "The Itch" on many different levels. And it was just coincidence that all this stuff kind of like came together for me. Because I get the itch all the time. And to me that really means something.”

Colleen Fitzpatrick (1972) American singer and actress

Attributed

Girl, Time

“Futurism and Cubism are comparable in importance tot the invention of perspective, for which they substituted a new concept op space. All subsequent movements were latent in them or brought about by them.... the two movements cannot be regarded as in opposition to each other, even though they started from opposite points; I maintain (an idea approved by Apollinaire and later by Matisse) that they are two extremes of the same sign, tending to coincide at certain points which only the poetic instinct of the painter can discover: poetry being the content and raison d'être of art.”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

Source: The Life of a Painter - autobiography', 1946, Letters of the great artists', 1963, p. 248-249

Art, Idea, Future

“Coincidences always happen if you keep your mind open, while storyboards remain the instruments of cowards who do not trust in their own imagination and who are slaves of a matrix… If you get used to planning your shots based solely on aesthetics, you are never that far from kitsch.”

Werner Herzog (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

Imagination

“I always look for people whose ideas coincide with mine, and then I'm ready to give them a chance to make a name for themselves.”

Michael Balcon (1896–1977) English Film producer

Halliwell's Who's Who in the Movies (2001 ed): Art. Michael Balcon p. 28

People, Idea, Chance

“Acting in conformity with reason, in the singular, and acting for good reasons, in the plural, are two different things insofar as reason is objective, whereas reasons are subjective. From an external point of view, we can evaluate a policy as being in conformity with reason or not. From an internal point of view, one can evaluate an action as being rational or not. From this difference it follows that only rationality can be used for explanatory ends. It is only insofar as the agent has made the demands of reason his own that the latter may give rise to, and possibly explain, specific behaviors. The assessment of the actor and that of the observer need not coincide.”

Jon Elster (1940) Norwegian academic

Reason and Rationality (2009)

Behavior

“It's no coincidence that an acute sensibility to the condition of animals comes up at the same time as industrialised food and concentration camp style farming.”

Gilles Dauvé (1947) French writer

"Letter on Animal Liberation" (1999)

Food, Time, Animals

“Coincidence is just the word we use when we have not yet discovered the cause.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, The Call Of Earth (1992)

“If we judge the achievements of other social groups in relation to the kind of objectives we set ourselves, we have at times to acknowledge their superiority; but in doing so we acquire the right to judge them, and hence to condemn all their other objectives which do not coincide with those we approve of. We implicitly acknowledge that our society with its customs and norms enjoys a privileged position, since an observer belonging to another social group would pass different verdicts on the same examples. This being so, how can the study of anthropology claim to be scientific? To reestablish an objective approach, we must abstain from making judgments of this kind. We must accept the fact that each society has made a certain choice, within the range of existing human possibilities, and that the various choices cannot be compared with each other: they are all equally valid. But in this case a new problem arises; while in the first instance we were in danger of falling into obscurantism, in the form of a blind refusal of everything foreign to us, we now run the risk of accepting a kind of eclecticism which would prevent us denouncing any feature of a given culture — not even cruelty, injustice and poverty, against which the very society suffering these ills may be protesting. And since these abuses also exist in our society, what right have we to combat them at home, if we accept them as inevitable when they occur elsewhere?”

Claude Lévi-Strauss book Tristes Tropiques

Source: Tristes Tropiques (1955), Chapter 38 : A Little Glass of Rum, pp.385-386

Home, Problem, Study, Suffering

“The method of exhaustion was not discovered all at once; we find traces of gropings after such a method before it was actually evolved. It was perhaps Antiphon. the sophist, of Athens, a contemporary of Socrates, who took the first step. He inscribed a square (or, according to another account, a triangle) in a circle, then bisected the arcs subtended by the sides, and so inscribed a polygon of double the number of sides; he then repeated the process, and maintained that, by continuing it, we should at last arrive at a polygon with sides so small as to make the polygon coincident with the circle. Thought this was formally incorrect, it nevertheless contained the germ of the method of exhaustion.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

p, 125
Achimedes (1920)

“Chopin is the true inventor of the concert etude, at least in the sense of being the first to give it complete artistic form—a form in which musical substance and technical difficulty coincide.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 6 : Chopin: Virtuosity Transformed

Music, Sense

“It is no coincidence that the ABM Treaty was signed midway between the delinking of the U. S. dollar from the gold standard in 1971 and the first oil crisis in 1973. These were the years not only of monetary and economic crises but also of both the beginning of the destruction of the welfare state and the shift of the hegemony of economic production from the factory to more social and immaterial sectors. One might think of these various transformations as different faces of one common phenomenon, one grand social transformation.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

39
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Thinking

“The Obie-Bunting showdown was only a screen for Archie's real purpose- searching for the traitor. He suspected that the traitor was a member of The Vigils. More than suspected. Few kids outside The Vigils knew that the day off from school was to have coincided with the Bishop's visit. And the letter to Leon had focused on the visit. Thus, the meeting was a place to begin his pursuit of the traitor, and instinct- instinct that had never failed him- dictated that he would find his betrayer there.”

Robert Cormier book Beyond the Chocolate War

Source: Beyond the Chocolate War (1985), p. 95

School, Search, Betrayal

“Gladness, in some instances, springs from a natural buoyancy of temperament, and is quite consistent with shallowness and superficiality of character. In other cases it is coincident with the swift flow of the currents of the blood, and ceases when the stream flows more slowly and begins to stagnate. Or it is due to gifts which an exceptional good fortune showers into the laps of favoured mortals. Gladness of this sort comes with happiness and departs with it.
But the purified gladness of which I speak is not dependent on these accidents. It is the mark of the ripest wisdom, and is based on the conviction, gained through experience, that life is worth living, that the victory is assured, and that the ends we pursue are of such excellence as to be incapable of ultimate defeat.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Section 4 : Moral Ideals
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)

Life, Wisdom, Spring, Nature

“By an unfailing coincidence, the man who wrongs us is a villain, and the man who does us a kindness is a saint.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 109

“To say that the cosmos was expanding is equally to say that its members were contracting. The ultimate centers of power, each at first coincident with the punctual cosmos, themselves generated the cosmical space by their disengagement from each other.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 162)

“COINCIDENCE You weren’t paying attention to the other half of what was going on.”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

context (3) “You Have to Push Him Over”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“A happy coincidence brought together [in Die Brücke ]the really talented men whose characters and gifts, even in human terms, left them with no other choice than the profession of artist. This form of living, of dwelling and working, though peculiar for a regular human being, was not a deliberate 'epater le bourgeois', but simply a very naive and pure necessity to harmonize art and life. And it was precisely this more than anything else that so tremendously influenced the forms of present-day art. Of course, it was mostly misunderstood and totally distorted, for there [the will] fashioned the form and gave it meaning, whereas here the unfamiliar form is affixed to habit, like a top hat on a cow.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

from Kirchner's Diary, 1923; as quoted in Expressionism, a German intuition, 1905-1920, Neugroschel, Joachim; Vogt, Paul; Keller, Horst; Urban, Martin; Dube, Wolf Dieter; (transl. Joachim Neugroschel); publisher: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1980, p. 93
1920's

Life, Men, Art, Fashion

“The intellectual abstraction of the second period of Cubism was of great importance, however. By its aspirations to the eternal and its 'concept of proportion inspired by the Classics' it revived the sense of craftsmanship concept in many painters. And this perfectly coincided with another of my ambitions – which was to make, with paint, an object having the same perfection of craftsmanship that a cabinet-maker would put into a piece of furniture.”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

Source: The Life of a Painter - autobiography', 1946, Letters of the great artists', 1963, p. 248

Sense, Painting, Perfection

“There’s no disputing the fact that I am politically conservative. But, ultimately, the question here is about fact patterns. Before the book was released, I took it to the investigative units at the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News and Fox News. They independently verified large portions of the book on important narratives. As to the book itself, there are seven or eight minor revisions made. The reader is either going to conclude the Clintons operate in a parallel universe that is just filled with amazing coincidences, or, like lots of politicians, they have recognized that official power is a means to self-enrichment, and they have done it on steroids in a way no other political figure has in modern American political history.”

Peter Schweizer (1964) American writer

The Interview: Author Peter Schweizer on the Clintons’ wealth http://www.macleans.ca/politics/washington/the-interview-author-peter-schweizer-on-the-clintons-wealth/ (June 15, 2015)

Books, Way, History, Question

“Although we talk so much about coincidence we do not really believe in it. In our heart of hearts we think better of the universe, we are secretly convinced that it is not such a slipshod, haphazard affair, that everything in it has meaning.”

J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) English writer

"A Coincidence," http://books.google.com/books?id=vmpHAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Although+we+talk+so+much+about+coincidence+we+do+not+really+believe+in+it+in+our+heart+of+hearts+we+think+better+of+the+universe+we+are+secretly+convinced+that+it+is+not+such+a+slipshod+haphazard+affair+that+everything+in+it+has+meaning%22&pg=PA215#v=onepage Going Up Stories and Sketches (1950)

Thinking, Universe, Heart

“Now, you think it's a coincidence that on September 11, 2001, we were struck by terrorists an evil that has at its heart the disregard of innocent human life? We who have for several decades killed not thousands but scores of millions of our own children, in disregard of the principle of innocent human life — I don't think that's a coincidence, I think that's a warning. I don't think that's a coincidence, I think that's a shot across the bow. I think that's a way of Providence telling us, "I love you all; I'd like to give you a chance. Wake up! Would you please wake up?"”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

Reaping the Fruits of the Moral Crisis, May 7, 2004. http://www.renewamerica.us/archives/speeches/04_05_07hellewell.htm. 2009

Love, Life, Children, Way

“Form - as a pattern of perception - can motivate the use of architecture. Architecture provides a complete service for its users, if function (practical purpose) coincides with use motivated by form.”

Justus Dahinden (1925) Swiss architect

Man and Space - Mensch und Raum 2005

Motivation

“Allah's Apostle said, "Say Amen' when the Imam says "Ghair-il-maghdubi 'alaihim wala-ddal-lin; not the path of those who earn Your Anger (such as Jews) nor of those who go astray (such as Christians); all the past sins of the person whose saying (of Amin) coincides with that of the angels, will be forgiven.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Narrated Abu Huraira, in Bukhari, Volume 1, Book 12, Number 749
Sunni Hadith

Angels, Past, Personality, Anger

“Do you not think that sometimes when matters are at the worst with us, when we appear to have done all which we ourselves can do, yet all has been unavailing, and we have only shown we cannot, not we will not, help ourselves; that often just then something comes, almost as if supernaturally, to settle for us, as if our guardian angel took pity on our perplexities, and then at last obtained leave to help us? And if it be so, then what might only be a coincidence becomes a call of Providence, a voice from Heaven, a command.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Letter VI
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Angels, Thinking, Appearance, Help

“For the corporation executives, the military metaphysic often coincides with their interest in a stable and planned flow of profit; it enables them to have their risk underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money. It is, in brief, a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based.”

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) American sociologist

The Causes of World War Three (1960)

Money

“And when you can no longer remember, just meaningless things here and there and you can't. But still try even then, as the twilight sets in, stand and look at the past, walk again along the corridors where your eyes used to wander, attentive ghosts, open the boxes, think of the other side of the wall. Sit at the side of the road and see yourself pass. See the web, see how the passages of the maze all lead again to the same point which does not exactly coincide with the exit.”

Dimitris Lyacos (1966) Greek writer

Source: Poena Damni Z213: Exit, p. 60, Shoestring Press, 2010.

Thinking, Past, Box

“Thousands of people with good qualities are displeasing; thousands pleasing with far less abilities, and why? Because the first wish to appear to be what they are not, the second are what they appear. Some of the advantages or disadvantages that we have received from nature please in proportion as we know the air, the style, the manner, the sentiments that coincide with our condition and our appearance, and displease in the proportion they are removed from that point.”

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) French author of maxims and memoirs

Reflections on Various Subjects (1665–1678), VII. On Air and Manner

People, Nature, Appearance

“Art and science coincide insofar as both aim to improve the lives of men and women.”

Bertolt Brecht A Short Organum for the Theatre

A Short Organum for the Theatre (1949)
Context: Art and science coincide insofar as both aim to improve the lives of men and women. The latter normally concerns itself with profit, the former with pleasure. In the coming age, art will fashion our entertainment out of new means of productivity in ways that will simultaneously enhance our profit and maximize our pleasure.

Women, Men, Art, Science

“People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

" The Planet that Wasn't http://geobeck.tripod.com/frontier/planet.htm" originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (May 1975) General sources Context: People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.

People

“Our philosophy… reduceth to a single origin and relateth to a single end, and maketh contraries to coincide so that there is one primal foundation both of origin and of end.”

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer

As translated by Dorothea Waley Singer (1950) 
De immenso (1591)
Context: Our philosophy… reduceth to a single origin and relateth to a single end, and maketh contraries to coincide so that there is one primal foundation both of origin and of end. From this coincidence of contraries, we deduce that ultimately it is divinely true that contraries are within contraries; wherefore it is not difficult to compass the knowledge that each thing is within every other.

“Spiritual beauty or the good, generally not only does not coincide with the typical meaning of beauty, it is its opposite.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)
Context: The good is the everlasting, the pinnacle of our life. … life is striving towards the good, toward God. The good is the most basic idea … an idea not definable by reason … yet is the postulate from which all else follows. But the beautiful … is just that which is pleasing. The idea of beauty is not an alignment to the good, but is its opposite, because for most part, the good aids in our victory over our predilections, while beauty is the motive of our predilections. The more we succumb to beauty, the further we are displaced from the good.... the usual response is that there exists a moral and spiritual beauty … we mean simply the good. Spiritual beauty or the good, generally not only does not coincide with the typical meaning of beauty, it is its opposite.

Beauty

“The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.”

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) French philosopher, critic and literary theorist

Conclusion
From Work to Text (1971)
Context: The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.

“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”

Jorge Luis Borges book On Exactitude in Science

On Exactitude in Science, as translated by Andrew Hurley, in Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions (1999); first published in Los Anales de Buenos Aires, año 1, no. 3 (March 1946)

Art, Study, Winter, Time

“The racist effects of Davis-Bacon are no mere coincidence. In fact, many original supporters of Davis-Bacon, such as Representative Clayton Allgood, bragged about supporting Davis-Bacon as a means of keeping cheap colored labor out of the construction industry.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Repeal Of The Davis-Bacon Law https://web.archive.org/web/20120119214747/http://www.ronpaularchive.com/1997/10/repeal-of-the-davis-bacon-law/ (23 October 1997). 1990s Context: Because most minority-owned construction firms are small companies, Davis-Bacon keeps minority-owned firms from competing for Federal construction contracts. The resulting disparities in employment create a demand for affirmative action, another ill-suited and ill-advised Big Government program. The racist effects of Davis-Bacon are no mere coincidence. In fact, many original supporters of Davis-Bacon, such as Representative Clayton Allgood, bragged about supporting Davis-Bacon as a means of keeping cheap colored labor out of the construction industry.

Color, Support

“I've found, during my admittedly limited experience in political reporting, that power & honesty very rarely coincide.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Comments on Pat Buchanan in a letter to Garry Wills (17 October 1973); published in Fear and Loathing in America (2000)
1970s
Context: We disagree so violently on almost everything that it's a real pleasure to drink with him. If nothing else, he's absolutely honest in his lunacy — and I've found, during my admittedly limited experience in political reporting, that power & honesty very rarely coincide.

“If those papers had been in my pocket I would have never lived to be seventy. I have led a strange life, a set of complete coincidences.”

Abraham Pais (1918–2000) American Physicist

On the fate of his friend Lion Nordheim, who was executed ten days before the end of the war, and his own release at around the same time, p. 52
To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000)
Context: On the day we were caught, Lion and I had been talking about writing a memorandum on the fate of the Jewish war children living in hiding or among Dutch families … we were the representatives of the Zionist youth organization. … Lion who had been taking notes of the discussion, put these papers in his jacket pocket when he took a break from lunch. When the Germans caught us they discovered his notes. If those papers had been in my pocket I would have never lived to be seventy. I have led a strange life, a set of complete coincidences.

Life

“Creationists mainly are Americans who think the world was created in 1982 to coincide with the rise of Supertramp, but you can very easily dispute this by playing some of Supertramp's earlier albums.”

Bill Bailey (1965) English comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author

Dandelion Mind (2010)

World, Thinking

“Magnolia is operatic in its ambition, a great, joyous leap into melodrama and coincidence, with ragged emotions, crimes and punishments, deathbed scenes, romantic dreams, generational turmoil and celestial intervention, all scored to insistent music. It is not a timid film.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review of Magnolia in Chicago Sun-Times (7 January 2000) http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/magnolia-2000 Reviews, Four star reviews Context: Magnolia is operatic in its ambition, a great, joyous leap into melodrama and coincidence, with ragged emotions, crimes and punishments, deathbed scenes, romantic dreams, generational turmoil and celestial intervention, all scored to insistent music. It is not a timid film. … The movie is an interlocking series of episodes that take place during one day in Los Angeles, sometimes even at the same moment. Its characters are linked by blood, coincidence and by the way their lives seem parallel. Themes emerge: the deaths of fathers, the resentments of children, the failure of early promise, the way all plans and ambitions can be undermined by sudden and astonishing events. … All of these threads converge, in one way or another, upon an event there is no way for the audience to anticipate. This event is not "cheating," as some critics have argued, because the prologue fully prepares the way for it, as do some subtle references to Exodus. It works like the hand of God, reminding us of the absurdity of daring to plan. And yet plan we must, because we are human, and because sometimes our plans work out. Magnolia is the kind of film I instinctively respond to. Leave logic at the door. Do not expect subdued taste and restraint, but instead a kind of operatic ecstasy. At three hours it is even operatic in length, as its themes unfold, its characters strive against the dying of the light, and the great wheel of chance rolls on toward them.

Dreams, Music

“Nonetheless, we can in the same breath deny that there is any such thing as coincidence. What's done is done, what's yet to be is clearly yet to be. In other words, sandwiched as we are between the "everything" that is behind us and the "zero" beyond us, ours is an ephemeral existence in which there is neither coincidence nor possibility.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982), Chapter 10, Counting Sheep
Context: We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze. Nonetheless, we can in the same breath deny that there is any such thing as coincidence. What's done is done, what's yet to be is clearly yet to be. In other words, sandwiched as we are between the "everything" that is behind us and the "zero" beyond us, ours is an ephemeral existence in which there is neither coincidence nor possibility. In actual practice, however, distinctions between the two interpretations amount to precious little. A state of affairs (as with most face-offs between interpretations) not unlike calling the same food by two different names. So much for metaphors.

“Jurgen returned again toward Barathum; and, whether or not it was a coincidence, Jurgen met precisely the vampire of whom he had inveigled his father into thinking.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

Ch. 37 : Invention of the Lovely Vampire http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/CABELL/ch37.htm Jurgen (1919) Context: Jurgen returned again toward Barathum; and, whether or not it was a coincidence, Jurgen met precisely the vampire of whom he had inveigled his father into thinking. She was the most seductively beautiful creature that it would be possible for Jurgen's father or any other man to imagine: and her clothes were orange-colored, for a reason sufficiently well known in Hell, and were embroidered everywhere with green fig–leaves. "A good morning to you, madame," says Jurgen, "and whither are you going?" "Why, to no place at all, good youth. For this is my vacation, granted yearly by the Law of Kalki—" "And who is Kalki, madame?" "Nobody as yet: but he will come as a stallion. Meanwhile his Law precedes him, so that I am spending my vacation peacefully in Hell, with none of my ordinary annoyances to bother me." "And what, madame, can they be?" "Why, you must understand that it is little rest a vampire gets on earth, with so many fine young fellows like yourself going about everywhere eager to be destroyed."

Thinking

“No matter how long the tyrant endures, he will be the loser at the end. Your thought differentiates between pragmatist and idealist, between the part and the whole, between the mystic and materialist. Mine realizes that life is one and its weights, measures and tables do not coincide with your weights, measures and tables. He whom you suppose an idealist may be a practical man.”

Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese artist, poet, and writer

Your Thought and Mine
Context: Your thought sees power in armies, cannons, battleships, submarines, aeroplanes, and poison gas. But mine asserts that power lies in reason, resolution, and truth. No matter how long the tyrant endures, he will be the loser at the end. Your thought differentiates between pragmatist and idealist, between the part and the whole, between the mystic and materialist. Mine realizes that life is one and its weights, measures and tables do not coincide with your weights, measures and tables. He whom you suppose an idealist may be a practical man.

Life, Parting

“One cannot dictate an aphorism to a typist. It would take too long. An aphorism never coincides with the truth: it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths. ”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

Truth

“The New Epoch is marked by the sign of Aquarius, and its ruler is Uranus... the affirmation of the power of the rays of Uranus always coincides with new trends in the whole life of our planet. It is also significant that the co-ruler with Uranus is Saturn, this symbol of the dark forces. Thus, all great epochs were marked by these two opposites, this struggle of the forces of Light with the forces of darkness. The tension of one side correspondingly intensifies the opposite side.”

Helena Roerich (1879–1955) Russian philosopher

23 October 1937

Light, Life

“If a congregation somewhere comes to life as Jerusalem at some hour, that carries no necessary implications for either the past or the future of that congregation. The Jerusalem occurrence is sufficient unto itself. There is—then and there—a transfiguration in which the momentary coincides with the eternal, the innocuous becomes momentous and the great is recognized as trivial, the end of history is revealed as the fulfillment of life here and now, and the whole of creation is beheld as sanctified.”

William Stringfellow (1928–1985) American theologian

Source: An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land (1973), pp. 60-61

Past, Future, Life, History

“The world is full of confusing coincidences.”

Algis Budrys book Michaelmas

“And a man’s mind insists on making patterns from random data.”
Source: Michaelmas (1977), Chapter 7 (p. 102)

World

“Shrimati Sonia Gandhi also issued an appeal a few days ago. Is it a coincidence that your appeal is reinforcing exactly the same? Can you vouch it for yourself and the other signatories that none has ever been a beneficiary of Congress’s alms? And that none of you have any vested interest, no political agenda? And no one is firing from your shoulders? If not, where was the need to get organized and send an appeal in such a hurry? Did you send this mail to all listed film professionals or just to those who you knew will sign blindly?”

Vivek Agnihotri (1973) director

Urban Naxals (2018)

“Most coincidences are simply chance events that turn out to be far more probable than many people imagine.”

Ivars Peterson (1948) Canadian mathematician

Source: The Jungles of Randomness: A Mathematical Safari (1997), Chapter 10, “Lifetimes of Chance” (p. 188)

Chance, Imagination, People

“Cultists. They’re like cockroaches. We humans are incredibly fine-tuned by evolution for the task of spotting coincidences and causal connections. It’s a very useful talent that dates back to the bad old days on the savannah (when noticing that there were lion prints by the watering hole and then cousin Ugg went missing, and today there are more lion prints and nobody had gone missing yet, was the kind of thing that could save your skin). But once we developed advanced lion countermeasures like stone axes and language, it turned into our secret curse. Because, you see, when we spot coincidences we assume there’s an intentional actor behind them—and that’s how we create religions. Nature does weird stuff, so it must be governed by supernature. There’s lightning in the clouds: Zeus must be throwing his thunderbolts again. Everyone’s dying of plague except those weird folks with the strange god who wash every day: it must be evil sorcery. And so on.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 8, “Club Zero” (p. 128)

God, Religion, Bad luck, Nature

“It ought to be perfectly clear by this time that the popularity and unpopularity of propositions in no way coincide with their truth and falsity. It makes no difference how true a proposition may be or how unreservedly it may finally be accepted by mankind, there is always a period in its early life when it is stoned and misunderstood. It has been so throughout the ages of the past; it is true to-day; and it will continue to be true as long as disparities in heroism and originality exist among men.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Conclusion, p. 211

Time, Past, Truth, Age

“It is not a belief or dogma formulated or invented by man, but is a knowledge of the laws which govern the evolution of the physical, astral, psychical, and intellectual constituents of nature and of man. The religion of the day is but a series of dogmas man-made and with no scientific foundation for promulgated ethics; while our science as yet ignores the unseen, and failing to admit the existence of a complete set of inner faculties of perception in man, it is cut off from the immense and real field of experience which lies within the visible and tangible worlds. But Theosophy knows that the whole is constituted of the visible and the invisible, and perceiving outer things and objects to be but transitory it grasps the facts of nature, both without and within. It is therefore complete in itself and sees no unsolvable mystery anywhere; it throws the word coincidence out of its vocabulary and hails the reign of law in everything and every circumstance.”

William Quan Judge (1851–1896) American occult writer

The Ocean of Theosophy by William Q. Judge (1893), Chapter 1, Theosophy and the Masters

Religion, Law, Nature, Knowledge

“I think it was a prescribed road of sorts. The things that had occurred since his childhood were some coincidences, but he kept on walking. It’s the illustration of a 42-year-long life, sort of an encyclopedia. Vasyl was not concerned about his career, he accepted things as befits a man, he was calm about the challenges of fate, well-balanced, and polite. Sometimes he could be tough in defending his position. But, in my view, everything was painted somewhere above. It’s easier to say that it was God’s will.”

Vasyl Slipak (1974–2016) Ukrainian opera singer

2017 Orest Slipak, the brother of singer. Brother about brother. The Day. Кyiv.ua. - 2017. - 27 April. https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/topic-day/brother-about-brother

Childhood, God, Painting, Fate

“The (respective) position of Judaism toward Spinoza coincides with the (respective) position of Europe toward him. However, it does not completely coincide with it. Spinoza played a special role in the Judaism of the past century. When what mattered was the justification of the breakup of the Jewish tradition and the entry of the Jews into modern Europe, perhaps no better, but certainly no more convenient, reference offered itself than the appeal to Spinoza. Who was more suitable for undertaking the justification of modern Judaism before the tribunal of the Jewish tradition, on the one hand, and before the tribunal of modern Europe, on the other, than Spinoza, who, as was almost universally recognized, was a classical exponent of this Europe and who, as one did not grow weary of at least asserting, had thought his thoughts in the spirit of Judaism and by means of Judaism? It is clear that, at a time when modern Europe has been shaken to its foundations, one can no longer justify oneself before this Europe for the sake of Judaism, nor before Judaism for the sake of this Europe, supposing one still wants to do so.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Leo Strauss, Das Testament Spinozas (1932) [original in German]
S - Z

Universe, Past, Time

“What constitutes an American? Not color nor race nor religion. Not the pedigree of his family nor the place of his birth. Not the coincidence of his citizenship. Not his social status nor his bank account. Not his trade nor his profession. An American is one who loves justice and believes in the dignity of man. An American is one who will fight for his freedom and that of his neighbor. An American is one who will sacrifice… An American is one in whose heart is engraved the immortal second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.”

Harold L. Ickes (1874–1952) American politician

Americans have always known how to fight for their rights and their way of life. Americans are not afraid to fight. They fight joyously in a just cause. "What Is An American?" http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/ickes.htm (18 May 1941)

Family, Religion, Justice, Freedom

“Painting does not use language. Abstract painting teaches us this, and this is what gives it its power of expression. If colour does not relate to the feelings of our soul through an external relation but finds its true being in them – as a pure sensation and a pure experience – then it does not even need to translate, through a means, the abstract content of our invisible life. It coincides with our invisible life and is its pathos: its suffering, its boredom, its neglect or its joy.”

Michel Henry (1922–2002) French writer

Books on Culture and Barbarism, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky (1988)
Source: Michel Henry, Seeing the invisible: On Kandinsky, Continuum, 2009, p. 72

Soul, Painting, Suffering, Joy

“The detour to ideality leads to coinciding with oneself, that is, to certainty, which remains the guide and guarantee of the whole spiritual adventure of being.”

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) French philosopher

The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 89

“It’s not a coincidence that governments use art on coins and notes. They do this to help us believe in money. Without art, it’s hard for us to believe in anything.”

Damien Hirst (1965) artist

Shaw, Anny, NFT breakthrough: Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin creates 99% energy efficient blockchain—and Damien Hirst is its first artist https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/nft-breakthrough-ethereum-co-founder-joe-lubin-creates-energy-efficient-blockchain-and-damien-hirst-is-its-first-artist, The Art Newspaper, 30 March 2021

Money, Help, Art

“Some people suggested that I should try something else. It was a lot of things, but nothing really stood out for me. Nothing felt right, and this job as an actor happened by coincidence.”

Claudia Kim (1985) South Korean actress

"I hope I am representing Asians well: Claudia Kim (IANS Interview)" in Business Standard (23 November 2018) https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-SEB-88149

People

“Is not all this an extraordinary concatenation of coincidence?”

Isaac Asimov book Foundation’s Edge

Pelorat said, “If you list it like that—”
“List it any way you please,” said Trevize. “I don’t believe in extraordinary concatenations of coincidence.”
Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation’s Edge (1982), Chapter 14 “Forward!” section 1, p. 281

“When the will of man and the Will of God coincide, you have right living - the Plan goes forward. There are no downfalls.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Reappearance of the Christ and the Masters of Wisdom (1980)

God

“I have extensive management experience in crisis situations, accumulated experience, and knowledge in the security and defense system. I have experience in overcoming the economic crisis. The current dangers and the accumulated experience and knowledge practically coincide”

Robert Kocharyan (1954) second President of Armenia

Excerpts from 2021 keynote speech on formation of 'Armenia' alliance

Knowledge

“When the will of man and the Will of God coincide, you have right living - the Plan goes forward... When you have a divergence of man's will from God's Will for long enough, disaster comes.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Reappearance of the Christ and the Masters of Wisdom (1980)

God

“The fundamental truth that makes us free is the grateful recognition that we come from God and we are not the product of chance, or of mere biological evolution, or of some cosmic coincidence.”

Andrés Stanovnik (1949) Catholic archbishop

Source: Bishop reminds Argentineans “man comes from God and is not product of chance” https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/4419/bishop-reminds-argentineans-man-comes-from-god-and-is-not-product-of-chance (17 July 2005)

God, Chance, Truth

“So what you are characterizing as conspiracy is merely an unfortunate coincidence.”

Charles E. Gannon (1960) American novelist

Source: Fire with Fire (2013), Chapter 7 (p. 93)

“I have never believed in coincidences, and my career path in journalism was definitely not a matter of chance, either. I always entrust to God's Providence the key matters of my life.”

Magdalena Wolińska-Riedi (1979) Polish-Vatican journalist and television presenter

What it’s like to live in the Vatican: The wife of a Swiss Guard tells us https://aleteia.org/2018/06/18/what-its-like-to-live-in-the-vatican-the-wife-of-a-swiss-guard-tells-us/ (18 June 2018)

God, Chance, Life