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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.