Ethan Zuckerman Quotes

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.

The best research is the research that you don't know that you are doing.

[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 do things in that way you get unexpected results. Then you do something else and you get unexpected results in another line, and you do that on a third line and then all of a sudden you see that one of these lines has something to do with the other. Then you make a discovery that you never could have made by going on a direct road.

I like chance meetings - life is full of them. Every day, without realising it, I pass people whom I should know.

I'm thankful for serendipitous moments in my life, where things could've gone the other way.

At one level, SXSW exemplifies serendipity, because whenever I come, I get these unexpected meetings with people I never knew existed, and you couldn't have planned it. But by making the choice to come to SXSW, I'm increasing the probability of those encounters.

I try to push and find something awkward. The gems to me are truly awkward situations, and you have to have somebody who's willing to fail because those can't be conceived. They never play if they're thought about and discussed too much. You have to create them right at the moment and look for something honest.

Sometimes you don't choose the material; the material chooses you.

When you can type a few words into a search engine and land on your topic - or when you can scan a Shakespeare play for specific words or symbols - what opportunities might you miss to expand your thinking in unexpected ways?

My life has been a series of well-orchestrated accidents; I've always suffered from hallucinogenic optimism.

I tend to navigate by indirection, meaning that most of the major things in my life have happened when I've been thinking about something else.

I've been truly blessed. I've been a fly on the wall of history. I've been just so many lucky places just by chance and serendipity, and obviously a huge portion of that serendipity had to do with my relationship with the real president, Ronald Reagan.

I'm always interested in the moment when lives somehow accidentally cross. I think sometimes those accidental meetings can be small miracles; they can really change one's perspective on that moment and on life.

Things happen in weird, serendipitous ways.

If you look at a great city, one of its amazing features is that you're going to find all sorts of things that you might not specifically have chosen in advance. And they will change your day. Maybe your month. Maybe your whole life.

My career has been a level of serendipity all along. I've never planned anything out more than a few years. All the places we lived - the 12, 13 countries - and the companies I worked for were a combination of circumstances.

Nothing was planned in my career.

It's funny how you never know who you're going to share your life with.

All the films that I did, I didn't plan them. They just came to me.

I come from a cycling background. I happened to be good at it; the opportunities came my way. It wasn't something I necessarily searched to be involved in; it wasn't a dream. I just had an opportunity which you couldn't refuse.

[T]hat I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf--felt akin to an instance of religious grace.

It is often while you are looking for something else entirely that you make the most amazing finds.

I was extremely frustrated, almost at the point of giving up on coming up with a name for the project (because I'm awful at it), when I decided to play the 'put a pen somewhere on a map with your eyes closed' game with South Africa. About the 5th try was St. Lucia in South Africa, which coincidentally also happens to be an idyllic sub-tropical seaside resort town. The name seemed to fit with the mood of the music, and so after a while it just stuck.

The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.

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.