A happy accident. [ Mme. De Stael ]

By many a happy accident. [ Thomas Middleton ]

The accident of an accident. [ Lord Thurlow ]

Accident is veiled necessity. [ Marie Ebner-Eschenbach ]

Nothing under the sun is accident. [ Lessing ]

Accident is simply unforeseen order. [ Novalis ]

High birth is an accident, not a virtue. [ Metastasio ]

What men call accident is God's own part. [ Bailey ]

Not a man, for being simply man,
Hath any honour, but honour for those honours
That are without him, as place, riches, favour,
Prizes of accident, as oft as merit. [ William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida ]

But as the unthought-on accident is guilty
To what we wildly do, so we profess
Ourselves to be the slaves of chance, and flies
Of every wind that blows. [ William Shakespeare ]

I've learned to judge of men by their own deeds;
I do not make the accident of birth
The standard of their merit. [ Mrs. Hale ]

There is no such thing as accident; It is fate misnamed. [ Napoleon I ]

I have been tempted by opportunity, and seconded by accident. [ Marmontel ]

To what happy accident is it that we owe so unexpected a visit? [ Goldsmith ]

Accident ever varies; substance can never suffer change or decay. [ Wm. Blake ]

The Orientals have another word for accident; it is kismet, - fate. [ Macaulay ]

Scholarship, save by accident, is never the measure of a man's power. [ Josiah Gilbert Holland (pseudonym Timothy Titcomb) ]

Noble blood is an accident of fortune; noble actions characterize the great. [ Goldoni ]

Trouble makes every sad accident a double evil, and contentedness makes it none at all. [ Proverb ]

Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; riches take wings; the only certainty is oblivion. [ Horace Greeley ]

The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident. [ Lamb ]

By accident, (i.e. not following from the nature of the thing, but from some accidental circumstance.

There is no such thing as chance; and what seems to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny. [ Friedrich Schiller ]

I consider your very testy and quarrelsome people in the same light as I do a loaded gun, which may, by accident, go off and kill one. [ William Shenstone ]

A friendship formed in childhood, in youth, - by happy accident at any stage of rising manhood becomes the genius that rules the rest of life. [ A. Bronson Alcott ]

Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flawed by heat, or violence, or accident, may as well be broken at once; it never can be trusted after. [ Landor ]

It is good sense applied with diligence to what was at first a mere accident, and which by great application grew to be called, by the generality of mankind, a particular genius. [ Johnson ]

Let him speak of his own deeds, and not of those of his forefathers. High birth is mere accident, and not a virtue; for if reason had controlled birth, and given empire only to the worthy, perhaps Arbaces would have been Xerxes, and Xerxes Arbaces. [ Metastasio ]

It is strictly and philosophically true in Nature and reason that there is no such thing as chance or accident; it being evident that these words do not signify anything really existing, anything that is truly an agent or the cause of any event; but they signify merely men's ignorance of the real and immediate cause. [ Adam Clarke ]

Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such: it is an accident, not a property, of a man; like light, it can give little or nothing, but at most may show what is given; often it is but a false glare, dazzling the eyes of the vulgar, lending, by casual extrinsic splendour, the brightness and manifold glance of the diamond to pebbles of no value. [ Carlyle ]

There are chords in the human heart - strange varying strings - which are only struck by accident; which will remain mute and senseless to appeals the most passionate and earnest, and respond at last to the slightest casual touch. In the most insensible or childish minds there is some train of reflection which art can seldom lead or skill assist, but which will reveal itself, as great truths have done, by chance, and when the discoverer has the plainest and simplest end in view. [ Dickens ]