Ten Quotes on Coincidences

A coincidence is "a sequence of events that although accidental seems to have been planned or arranged," according to the FreeDictionary. I've had so many in my life that I have lost count of them. Since I'm not a habitual note-taker or a diary-keeper, it will take me really serious effort to recall all those.

But I am suddenly conscious again about coincidences precisely because of several recent developments in my life that are so uncanny in terms of context, timing and significance, relative to what I am planning for my next career shift. I have not blogged here for two weeks now precisely because I've been busy with activities that will lead to my next "incarnation," this time as an entrepreneur. Join me as I explore further the nature of COINCIDENCES, as other people viewed or experienced it:

In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. -William S. Burroughs

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A coincidence is a small miracle in which God chooses to remain anonymous. -Unknown

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Coincidence is the word we use when we can't see the levers and pulleys. -Emma Bull

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Coincidences are spiritual puns. -G.K. Chesterton

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There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from. -Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

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If you do something once, people will call it an accident. If you do it twice, they call it a coincidence. But do it a third time and you've just proven a natural law. -Grace Murray Hopper

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If there were no such thing as coincidence, there would be no such word. -Heron Carvic

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Coincidence, if traced far enough back, becomes inevitable. -Hineu

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Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous. -Albert Einstein

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Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences. -Robert Anton Wilson

(Photo credit: www.sxc.hu)

Quotes From “The Soul’s Code: In Search Of Character And Calling”

My inner journey started in the Summer of 1967, just before I entered college. On one otherwise forgettable day that summer, a religious missionary found her way into our sleepy barrio and gifted my mother with a slim blue-covered pamphlet entitled “Why Are You Here?”

That question has bothered me ever since. I still am today, after years of disappointing on and off research and self-study on a subject that I know now has no precise answers. This book by James Hillman, which I acquired in July 1999, helped a lot in my soul-search. The marked sentences and passages in my copy of this book which are shown below are the lessons I learned which I would like to share:

On the “Acorn Theory”:

“…the ‘acorn theory’ …holds that each person bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived.”

On “Calling”:

“Each person enters the world called.”

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“A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim.”

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“…calling seems closest during the years through eight and then again during adolescence…”


On “Character”:

“You are born with a character; it is given; a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians before your birth.”


On “Soul”:

“The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth.”

On “Childhood”:

“…we must attend very carefully to childhood to catch early glimpses of the daimon in action, to grasp its intentions and not block its way.”

On “Image”:

“…you and I and every single person is born with a defining image.”

On “Compensation Theory”:

“…the roots of later superiorities are buried in early inferiorities.”

On “Vision”:

“…as almost every extraordinary life shows, there is a vision, an ideal that calls. To what precise actuality it calls usually stays vague if not altogether unknown.”

On “Biographies”:

“They give our lives an imaginary dimension.”

On “Fate”:

“How curious that life can be foreordained and yet not foretold.”

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“Catching the sly winks of fate is a reflective act. It is an act of thought…”

On “Accidents”:

“The world is run as much by folly as by wisdom, as much as order as by chaos, but—and this ‘but’ is huge—these accidents may still intend something interesting.”

On “Success”:

“…the source of success appears to lie in a mother’s doting—or in her neglectful selfishness, which forces an offspring out on its own.”

On “Love Maps”:

“The theory of love maps suggests that environmental conditioning determines the object of your desire.”

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“…long before your true love walks past you in a classroom, at a shopping mall, or in the office, you have already constructed some basic elements of your ideal sweetheart.”

On “Platonic Myth”:

“…a person is born with an innate paradigm that is not identical with genetic endowment..”

On “Code of the Soul”:

“…’in late adulthood’, when calling, character, and fate have become more inescapable, then, too, one’s intelligence, and all that it serves, belongs more to the code of the soul than to that of the genes.”

On “Intuition”:

“Intuitions occur; we do not make them. They come to us as a sudden idea, a definite judgment, a grasped meaning.”

-James Hillman

Quotes From "Soul Moments"

In “Soul Moments”, Phil Cousineau presents a terrific collection of synchronicity stories which fed my longing for heartwarming stories of meaningful coincidences in May 2002, during a brief three-month interlude in my professional career. Here are the lessons I learned:

On “Synchronicity”:

“…synchronicity is less a phenomenon to be proved than a fascination to be lived.”

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“For me, synchronicity is an inexplicable but profoundly meaningful coincidence that stirs the soul and offers a guiding glimpse of one’s destiny.”

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“For all its usual brevity, an experience of synchronicity is marked by elegance, symmetry, vividness, suddenness, poetry, or a truth that speaks to the heart, often finally a sense of the unforgettable…”

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“…there are no accidents in the circle of synchronicity.”

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“…synchronicities arose during points of crisis in people’s lives, and moreover, contained insights, seeds of the future, and signs of destiny, if only people learned how to read them.”

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“…an experience of synchronicity is a soul moment, an electrifying experience, as sudden as a visitation by a god, a palpable inrush of grace and power, one of the defining moments in life, a sudden conviction that we might move beyond fate and realize a hint of our destiny.”

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“There is a palpable link between synchronicity and destiny.”

On “Moments”:

“I know I couldn’t make it through the rest of the day if every moment had momentous significance.”

On “Meaning of Life”:

“…the meaning of life is not only in the quest for one’s own well-being but lies in the service of something greater.”

On “Life’s Stories”:

“…there are only six kinds of stories that are repeated over and over…”


On “True Vocation”:

“…if one does the work proper to one’s true vocation, ‘the grace of great things’ will come naturally.”

- Phil Cousineau