Accidental Discovery Quotes

Well, it was kind of an accident, because plastic is not what I meant to invent. I had just sold photograph paper to Eastman Kodak for 1 million dollars.

Half of art is accident, but there is no accident without free experiment.

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.

I got hooked into folk music by accident, because that's what white college kids liked when I was a child.

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.

I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.

I didn't intend to even become an actor. I was studying fashion, and I think acting just happened by chance. It really felt more like I was watching a movie from outside, like it was happening to someone else. It's been a great journey so far.

I think making a movie or a record, the best things happen by accident - and those end up being the magic. Every time I've followed my gut it's been better than when I've tried to do what I was supposed to do.

I have a theory that the only original things we ever do are mistakes.

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

I became an inventor by accident. I was out of the Air Force in 1956. No, no, that's not true: I went in in 1956, came out in 1959, was working at the University of Washington, and I came up with an idea, from reading a magazine article, for a new kind of a phonograph tone arm.

One hardly knows where, in the history of science, to look for an important movement that had its effective start in so pure and simple an accident as that which led to the building of the great Washington telescope, and went on to the discovery of the satellites of Mars.

I have made a career of bumbling around places, stumbling on landmarks and generally being quite haphazard and shambolic about the way I go about things.

I started in radio, again accidentally. I wasn't looking for this kind of work at all.

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

They say a blind hog will find the acorn one day.

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

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.

When I left Michigan and I came to New York, that was my goal, to be a professional dancer. And I sort of fell into singing by accident in a way.

I was 24 years old at the time. I had no real notion of what photography was about. I had no training. By accident, I put a negative in an enlarger, and you can do many things with that negative.

A man for whom accident discovers sense, is not a rational being. A man only is so who understands, who distinguishes, who tests it.

The most valuable discoveries have found their origin in the most trivial accidents.

Creating and producing creative work, to me, those are all happy accidents.

Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds.

I kind of drifted into acting through a series of coincidences.