Life & Wisdom Quote by James Fenton

Nobody stumbles into sainthood. Fenton’s line is blunt enough to sound like common sense, but its real charge is suspicion: the “guru” is less an enlightened accident than a constructed role, auditioned for and then inhabited. In four words, he punctures the romantic myth of charisma as natural weather. Gurus are made, and making implies intention, rehearsal, and an audience willing to be managed.

“By accident” does the heavy lifting. It rejects the flattering idea that authority is simply recognized, as if truth automatically crowns its speaker. Instead, Fenton nudges us toward the backstage: the self-curation, the strategic vagueness, the cultivated aura of access to something the rest of us can’t see. The line also implicates the followers. A guru requires demand; the marketplace for certainty creates the supply. The subtext isn’t just that the guru wants power, but that people want to outsource doubt.

As a poet, Fenton understands how voice works: tone can masquerade as revelation. The sentence is almost proverb-like, but it’s too dry to be comforting. It reads like a warning about the aesthetics of wisdom, how performance and perception can launder ambition into “spiritual” authority. In a culture that rewards personal branding and converts confidence into credibility, Fenton’s point lands with contemporary force: the guru is rarely a miracle. More often, it’s a career path.