From the corner of my eye I saw her. Of course this chance encounter with Rebecca wasn’t serendipitous. (I’m not throwing that word out there to illustrate my broad vocabulary, but rather to show that...

The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable,...

But in Friendship, being free of all that, we think we have chosen our peers. In reality, a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the...

Cultivate the art of maximizing serendipitous opportunities.

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night’s sleep, and strangers’ monologues framed like Russian short stories.

Dip your serenity in serendipity and let the surprise be your prize

Do you think the universe fights for souls to be together? Some things are too strange and strong to be coincidences.

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...

As is often the case when I travel, my vulnerability — like not knowing what the hell I’m going to do upon arrival — makes me more open to outside interactions than I might be...

Ci eravamo incontrati perché doveva succedere, e anche se non fosse stato quel giorno, prima o poi ci saremmo sicuramente incontrati da qualche altra parte.

Of course, that’s how life is. A turn of events may seem very small at the time it’s happening, but you never really know, do you? How can you?

You could make mistakes when you lived together because you knew you’d wake up the next morning with another chance.

When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the...

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...

There’s that day when you realize that everything that happened before that one person found you, probably happened to prepare you and to prepare everything, for that person’s arrival. It’s not that everything suddenly “makes...

What is luck’, he said, ‘but the ability to exploit accidents?

chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.

Magari qualcosa, una moneta che cade, un piccolo braccialetto che si impiglia alla maglia di qualcuno, uno scontrino che scivola via, cambia il destino di una persona. E quella persona, per un piccolo, banalissimo gesto,...

With a library it is easier to hope for serendipity than to look for a precise answer.

When love feels like magic, you call it destiny. When destiny has a sense of humor, you call it serendipity.

When you broadcast your book reading voluntarily, it creates moments of fascinating serendipity.

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.

Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our worlds; it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of serendipitous opportunities that were somehow absent before the change.

I felt a numb shock as I drove home anxious to get my chocolate flowers and wondering how my mother arranged to get them delivered to me at the exact time of her passing as...

Every human relationship begins with a coincidence. Even the most fundamental relationship – that of parent and child – begins entirely with a coincidence. The child is produced by whatever serendipity brought its parents together,...

[In the case of research director, Willis R. Whitney, whose style was to give talented investigators as much freedom as possible, you may define ‘serendipity’ as] the art of profiting from unexpected occurrences. When you...

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

Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth – the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly...

The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality....