Randall Munroe Quotes

Some of the greatest things, as I understand, they have come about by serendipity, the greatest discoveries.

From the age of four, I was a huge comic fan and still am. When Lost in Space came along it was like being in a huge comic so we jumped at the chance of being part of that project and it proved to be a good choice.

Coincidence is the word we use when we can't see the levers and pulleys.

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.

In the brush doing what it is doing, it will stumble on what one could not do by oneself.

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event.

Look at where I landed, you would think I planned it. I'm just doin me and you can never understand it.

(The discovery of penicillin) was a triumph of accident, a fortunate occurrence which happened while I was working on a purely academic bacteriological problem.

The literature of science is filled with answers found when the question propounded had an entirely different direction and end.

Relevance is not something you can predict. It is something you discover after the fact.

Fate has a strange way of making plans.

You know, the process, I think, is the story. And it goes back, again, to what I said about chance and about radical contingency, the idea that all of this is this well-oiled machine that's been reared up and, like, really articulated and thought about.

It's like that old expression: "Men plan and god laughs." You sort of see that in the television world, where you have an idea where things are heading and you have a plan and sort of start off in that general direction, but you wind up taking all these side paths and whatnot - if you're lucky.

When I'm asked about my work, I try to explain that there is no mystery involved. It is work. But things happen all the time that are unexpected, uncontrolled, unexplainable, even magical. The work prepares you for that moment. Suddenly the clouds roll in and the soft light you longed for appears.

All serious innovation is only rendered possible by some accident enabling unpopular persons to survive.

Life is full of doors that don't open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when you don't want them to.

Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds.

... I discovered life sometimes has a way of giving you what you need, but not in the form you expect.

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.

I throw down the gauntlet to chance. For example, I prepare the ground for a picture by cleaning my brush over the canvas. Spilling a little turpentine can also be helpful.

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 was no such thing as luck. Luck was a word idiots used to explain the consequences of their own rashness, and selfishness, and stupidity. More often than not bad luck meant bad plans.

If you don't have a plan, you can end up doing some interesting things.

That's the thing about destiny: It can't be predicted, and it's usually pretty odd.