quotes about Serendipity
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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.
-- Adrian BejanSource : "Constructal Theory of Social Dynamics". Book by Adrian Bejan and Gilbert W. Merkx, 2007.
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Some of the greatest things, as I understand, they have come about by serendipity, the greatest discoveries
-- Alan Alda -
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.
-- Albert Hofmann -
What I look for is neither reality nor unreality but the subconscious, the instinctive mystery of the human race.
-- Amedeo Modigliani -
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Each painting is fresh and new, a surprise even to myself.
-- Anne Jackson -
When you broadcast your book reading voluntarily, it creates moments of fascinating serendipity.
-- Clive Thompson -
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.
-- Coco Chanel -
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.
-- Cybill ShepherdSource : "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.
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There is a fine line between serendipity and stalking.
-- David Coleman -
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.
-- David Levithan -
We didn't believe in fate, but we believed in serendipity. We felt very lucky.
-- David Levithan -
Politics is so much about serendipity that we've got to have a bigger pool of women, so that when people drop out of the process, you've got others to turn to.
-- Eleanor Clift -
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Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.
-- Elizabeth Berg -
Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult.
-- Erin McKeanSource : "Search Patterns : Design for Discovery". Book by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender (p. 131), 2010.
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Only now I'm learning to enjoy not being in charge of what the next stroke will do to the whole painting. I'm still learning that there are no mistakes, only discoveries.
-- Fernando Araujo PerdomoSource : Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.
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Fact is, inventing an innovative business model is often mostly a matter of serendipity.
-- Gary Hamel -
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There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.
-- Georges Braque -
It is the unforeseeable that creates the event.
-- Georges Braque -
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.
-- Horace WalpoleSource : Letter to Horace Mann, 28 Jan. 1754. Coinage of the word serendipity.
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There's always going to be the circumstances you can't plan for. There's always the unexpected relevance and the serendipity.
-- Jason Silva -
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When I paint, mysterious things happen. What starts with a void ends with a dialogue.
-- Jeet Aulakh -
There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.
-- Jeff Bezos -
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.
-- Jill Abramson -
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.
-- Joan Erikson -
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You don't reach Serendib by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings ... serendipitously.
-- John Barth -
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.
-- John Locke -
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.
-- Jon Huntsman, Jr.Source : "POLITICO interview: Gov. Huntsman". Interview with Alexander Burns, www.politico.com. February 24, 2009.
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What people call serendipity sometimes is just having your eyes open,
-- Jose Manuel Barroso -
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While traveling, I've found that spontaneity keeps things fresh, while serendipity guides me through it all. There have been a lot of rough moments along the way, but they often bear the best memories.
-- Joseph PisaniSource : "Oh Sweet Serendipity". Inside Switzerland magazine, Winter 2007.
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The instant you know what the result will be, you are lost.
-- Juan Gris -
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.
-- Julio Cortazar -
Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer's daughter.
-- Julius H. Comroe, Jr.Source : "What Does That Mean? : Exploring Mind, Meaning, and Mysteries". Book by Eldon Taylor (p. 9), 2010.
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I always leave room for serendipity and chance.
-- Ken Stott -
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.
-- Laura Lippman -
One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.
-- Lawrence Block -
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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.
-- Lily Tomlin -
It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.
-- Lois McMaster Bujold -
We have built a thousand temples to Fortune and not one to Reason
-- Marcus Cornelius Fronto -
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.
-- Mary Oliver -
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The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical.
-- Maya Lin -
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.
-- Michael Behe -
The universe is always speaking to us... sending us little messages, causing coincidences and serendipities,reminding us to stop, to look around, to believe in something else, something more.
-- Nancy ThayerSource : Nancy Thayer (2010). “Beachcombers: A Novel”, p.3, Ballantine Books
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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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
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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.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb -
Serendipity is putting a quarter in the gumball machine and having three pieces come rattling out instead of one-all red.
-- Peter H. Reynolds -
Most of us have one big idea at some point in our lives. That Eureka! moment. It comes to us all in different ways, often by chance of serendipity.
-- Peter James -
There's some mysterious process at work here, which I don't even want to understand.
-- Philip Guston -
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Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice
-- Pico Iyer -
It was like their lives were overlapping lines, like they had their own gravity. Usually, that serendipity thing felt like the nicest thing the universe had ever done for her.
-- Rainbow Rowell -
Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.
-- Rene Magritte -
Like all photographers, I depend on serendipity I pray for what might be referred to as the angel of chance.
-- Sally Mann -
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Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.
-- Siddhartha Mukherjee -
Plan to the extent that feels right to you at a particular time in your life, but always be open to serendipity.
-- Steve LeveenSource : Steve Leveen (2005). “The Little Guide to Your Well-read Life”
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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.
-- Steven Pressfield -
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.
-- Steven Pressfield -
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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.
-- Susan Stroman -
Innovation is serendipity, so you don't know what people will make.
-- Tim Berners-Lee -
You need messiness and magic, serendipity and insanity. Creativity comes from time off, and time out.
-- Timothy Egan -
The history of discovery is full of creative serendipity.
-- Tom KelleySource : Tom Kelley, David Kelley (2013). “Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All”, p.123, Crown Business
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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.
-- Twiggy -
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.
-- William A. Dembski -
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.
-- William A. Dembski -
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.
-- Yves Klein -
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For me, serendipity, coincidence and chance are more interesting than any preconceived construct of our human encounters.
-- Charles Traub -
Serendipity looks a lot like creativity, at least at a distance, and if I can tap into these ways in which one thing resembles another.
-- Jonathon KeatsSource : Source: therumpus.net
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Serendipity is nice, but hoping for luck and the magic of happenstance shouldn't be an excuse for a lack of proactivity. I had to learn for myself that waiting isn't a life plan.
-- Karen Finerman -
The internet has made it possible to meet more people, make more connections and do more interesting work than would ever have been possible . It enables serendipity at an entirely new scale.
-- Suw Charman-Anderson -
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I think it's often easier to theorize in the official codes of theory rather than to theorize lightly through scene, object, story, and incident in ways that keeps alive the sensual serendipities of language. This is not a question of being for or against theory, but rather of being suspicious of orthodoxies that concede, in advance, that what passes for theory must be signaled by a narrowing of diction, sentence rhythms, and sensual awareness. I'm in favor of surprise.
-- Rob NixonSource : Source: www.huffingtonpost.com
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Synergy and serendipity often play a big part in medical and scientific advances.
-- Julie BishopSource : "With synergy, differences are celebrated, provided you have the energy" by D. Murali in "The Hindu", July 15, 2005.