Life & Wisdom Quote by J.B. Priestley

Priestley’s line has the cool sting of fatalism, but it’s not nihilism; it’s a diagnostic tool. “Accidents, try to change them - it’s impossible” rejects the comforting fantasy that contingency can be edited after the fact, as if life were a draft. The dash matters: it mimics the mind’s reflex to bargain with reality, then snaps shut. You can replay the moment, litigate the “if only,” invent alternate timelines. The accident stays put.

Then comes the turn: “The accidental reveals man.” Priestley isn’t romanticizing chaos; he’s arguing that character is most legible when our scripts fail. Plans are curated performances. Accidents strip away the stage directions and show what’s underneath: courage or cruelty, generosity or self-preservation, honesty or spin. In that sense, the “accidental” isn’t merely random; it’s a stress test that exposes the values we claim versus the instincts we live by.

Contextually, Priestley writes out of a century that made accidents feel like fate: industrial modernity, war, air raids, sudden loss. His work often worries at time, responsibility, and the moral choices people make when the clock lurches unexpectedly. Read this way, the quote is less about surrendering to randomness than about refusing alibis. You don’t get to revise the collision, the mistake, the misfortune; you only get to choose what you do next. The accident becomes a mirror, and Priestley’s point is that we should look.