And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
And breasts the blows of circumstance. [ Tennyson ]

Condition, circumstance, is not the thing;
Bliss is the same in subject or in king. [ Pope ]

I am the very slave of circumstance
And impulse - borne away with every breath. [ Byron ]

Who does the best his circumstance allows.
Does well, acts nobly; angels could no more. [ Edward Young ]

In science we have to consider two things: power and circumstance. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Men are the sport of circumstances, when the circumstances seem the sport of men. [ Byron ]

Circumstance, that unspiritual god and miscreator, makes and helps along our coming evils. [ Byron ]

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

The test or measure of poetic genius is to read the poetry of affairs, to fuse the circumstance of today. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

Man is not the creature of circumstances; circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]

The friendship I have conceived will not be impaired by absence; but it may be no unpleasing circumstance to brighten the chain by a renewal of the covenant. [ George Washington ]

There is nothing more necessary to establish reputation than to suspend the enjoyment of it. He that cannot bear the sense of merit with silence must of necessity destroy it; for fame being the genial mistress of mankind, whoever gives it to himself insults all to whom he relates any circumstance to his own advantage. [ Steele ]

Excellence in art is to be attained only by active effort, and not by passive impressions; by the manly overcoming of difficulties, by patient struggle against adverse circumstance, by the thrifty use of moderate opportunities. The great artists were not rocked and dandled into eminence, but they attained to it by that course of labor and discipline which no man need go to Rome or Paris or London to enter upon. [ Hillard ]

Throughout the pages of history we are struck with the fact that our remarkable men possessed mothers of uncommon talents for good or bad, and great energy of character; it would almost seem from this circumstance, that the impress of the mother is more frequently stamped on the boy, and that of the father upon the girl - we mean the mental intellectual impress, in distinction from the physical ones. Mothers will do well to remember that their impress is often stamped upon their sons. [ Helen Mar ]

True hope is based on energy of character. A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope, because it knows the mutability of human affairs and how slight a circumstance may change the whole course of events. Such a spirit, too, rests upon itself, it is not confined to partial views, or to one particular object. And if at last all should be lost, it has saved itself, its own integrity and worth. Hope awakens courage, while despondency is the last of all evils, it is the abandonment of good, the giving up of the battle of life with dead nothingness. He who can implant courage in the human soul is the best physician. [ Von Knebel (German), Translated by Mrs. Austin ]