Horace Walpole Quotes

Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.

All good ideas arrive by chance.

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.

There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

Winning a Nobel Prize isn't about being clever at all. It's about making... at least in physiology or medicine, it's about making discoveries, and you don't have to be clever to make a discovery, I don't think; it just comes up and punches you on the nose.

Some of the best ideas come from sheer discovery, and not by some masterminded, preconceived genius.

Many of the world's greatest discoveries have been by accident. I mean, look at the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, or Botox.

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. That means that you look for something, you have a certain plan, and then you find something else, different, that may nevertheless be useful.

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

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.

All of the very important events in my life happen by chance.

One sometimes finds what one is not looking for.

Maybe you're going to a concert thinking you're not going to hear anything but music. But you may walk away from there with an answer to a problem that you're carrying around with you that you didn't think you were going to hear about.

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

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

Nothing I do is by design. It's always the result of a happy accident. I didn't have a career plan. It has just become the way it is. It's all good fun.

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

It's a bloody shame that all the video stores have gone, I'll tell you. Everything's so mechanical now. It's all so if-you-liked-this-then-you'll-like-this. There's no picking something out, or finding some brilliant person to open up new worlds for you.

Some of the most important discoveries that scientists have made were not what they were seeking at the time.

I like things that take you by the hand and say, 'You think you know about this - you think you understand it - but there's so much that you don't.'

Even fools say something worthwhile now and again. Even a blind pig finds an acorn sometimes.

... by chance you will say, but chance only favors the mind which is prepared.

With books at least, the best experiences are not when you find what you were looking for, but when something quite different finds you, takes you by surprise, shifts your tastes to new territory.

the discoveries don't come when you're looking for them. They come when for some reason you've let go conscious control.

A lot of times, you're circling around a lot of things, and then you find that one person, or that little piece of dialogue, and it doesn't always have to be in person.