Serendipity Quotes

What I look for is neither reality nor unreality but the subconscious, the instinctive mystery of the human race.

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.

We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written.

Innovation is serendipity, so you don't know what people will make.

There's always going to be the circumstances you can't plan for. There's always the unexpected relevance and the serendipity.

There is a fine line between serendipity and stalking.

I've always loved life, and I've never known what's ahead. I love not knowing what might be round the corner. I love serendipity.

Serendipity is putting a quarter in the gumball machine and having three pieces come rattling out instead of one-all red.

I don't understand how a woman can leave the house without fixing herself up a little - if only out of politeness. And then, you never know, maybe that's the day she has a date with destiny. And it's best to be as pretty as possible for destiny.

The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process.

Like all photographers, I depend on serendipity I pray for what might be referred to as the angel of chance.

There's a serendipity to real life that the Internet can't duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it's that book that changes your life.

There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.

When I paint, mysterious things happen. What starts with a void ends with a dialogue.

It is true that my discovery of LSD was a chance discovery, but it was the outcome of planned experiments and these experiments took place in the framework of systematic pharmaceutical, chemical research. It could better be described as serendipity.

The instant you know what the result will be, you are lost.

Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.

What I am trying to translate to you is more mysterious, it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the implacable source of sensations.

Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.

...maximize the serendipity around you.

Go to parties. You can't even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

There's some mysterious process at work here, which I don't even want to understand.

Vital lives are about action. You can't feel warmth unless you create it, can't feel delight until you play, can't know serendipity unless you risk.

The essential of painting is that 'something', that 'ethereal glue,' that 'intermediary product' which the artist exudes with all his creative being and which he has the power to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial matter of the painting.

Surrender is a positive, healthy state. Being a surrendered person does not mean one is beaten down and so hopeless he or she has "given up." It's quite the contrary. Surrender is a state of living in the flow, trusting what is, and being open to serendipity and surprises.

In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.

It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean.

Surrender is a state of living in the flow, trusting what is, and being open to serendipity and surprises.

Maybe the absence of signs is a sign.

Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer's daughter.

I had the serendipity of modeling during a temporary interlude between Twiggy and Kate Moss, when it was actually okay for women to look as if we ate and enjoyed life.

You need messiness and magic, serendipity and insanity. Creativity comes from time off, and time out.

I believe in serendipity, but I also believe there are times when you have to be the one who lines up everything so it can fall into place.

I am a firm believer in serendipity- all the random pieces coming together in one wonderful moment, when suddenly you see what their purpose was all along.

Serendipity... You will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called 'The Three Princes of Serendip': as their Highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.

There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying. Why is this important? Because when we sit down day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious starts to happen. A process is set in motion by which, inevitably and infallibly, heaven comes to our aid. Unseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose.

We have built a thousand temples to Fortune and not one to Reason

If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters.

Serendipity is the way to make discoveries, by accident but also by sagacity, of things one is not in quest of. Based on experience, knowledge, it is the creative exploitation of the unforeseen.

When we sit down day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious starts to happen... Unseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose.

You know being relevant or coming up with something interesting, funny to say about what's current is just as hard as it might ever be depending on the serendipity of it all.

Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.

It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.

One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.

Politics is a lot of serendipity. You're in the right place and the right time and you've got the right message, and it either connects for you or, or it doesn't.

I admit that I am hopelessly hooked on the printed newspaper. I love turning the pages and the serendipity of stumbling across a piece of irresistible information or a photograph that I wasnt necessarily intending to read.

Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult.

Synergy and serendipity often play a big part in medical and scientific advances.