Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

The concept of serendipity often crops up in research. Serendipity is the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things that were not being sought. I believe that all researchers can be serendipitous.

Expose yourself to as much randomness as possible.

Innovation is serendipity, so you don't know what people will make.

All good ideas arrive by chance.

Not having any real direction, one writer would lead me to another.

There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

Though men are apt to flatter and exalt themselves with their great achievements, yet these are, in truth, very often owing not so much to design as chance.

Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.

Certain things you have to stumble on to. They can't be preprogrammed.

Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I'd put myself in the latter category. But I'd never call myself a normal designer of anything.

In using chance operations, the mind is enriched.

Chance never writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; chance never drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will; nor can it be without absurdity supposed able to do them; which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree.

What else is chance but the rude stone which receives its life from the sculptor's hand? Providence gives us chance, and man must mould it to his own designs.

Chance... in the accommodation peculiar to sensorimotor intelligence, plays the same role as in scientific discovery. It is only useful to the genius and its revelations remain meaningless to the unskilled.

In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment.

Play is experimenting with chance.

Is there a design in the events of our lives? Or do things just happen, much like a junk yard falling down a staircase? If it's the latter, how do you deal with it?

Nothing happens quite by chance. It's a question of accretion of information and experience ... it's just chance that I happened to be here at this particular time when there was available and at my disposal the great experience of all the investigators who plodded along for a number of years.

I have been trying to point out that in our lives chance may have an astonishing influence and, if I may offer advice to the young laboratory worker, it would be this-never neglect an extraordinary appearance or happening. It may be-usually is, in fact-a false alarm that leads to nothing, but may on the other hand be the clue provided by fate to lead you to some important advance.

Because you don’t ever find things when you’re looking for them. You find them when you’re not.” “If that were true, nobody would ever find their keys.

...maximize the serendipity around you.

They go in [to the library] not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.

The element of chance in basic research is overrated. Chance is a lady who smiles only upon those few who know how to make her smile.

Chance favours the trained mind.

Chance does not speak essentially through words nor can it be seen in their convolution. It is the eruption of language, its sudden appearance. It's not a night twinkle with stars, an illuminated sleep, nor a drowsy vigil. It is the very edge of consciousness.