Unexpected Discovery Quotes

Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult.

Christopher Columbus was looking for a passage to India, but he landed in America. He landed in the wrong place, and when he got back, he wasn't sure where he'd been. But most important of all, he did it on someone else's money.

Once in awhile you get shown the light, in the strangest of places if you look it right

An uncle of mine emigrated to Canada and couldn't take his guitar with him. When I found it in the attic, I'd found a friend for life.

Serendipity. Look for something, find something else, and realize that what you've found is more suited to your needs than what you thought you were looking for.

Once you've been backstage at a theater, the theater is never the same for you. Once you've noticed the crack in the vase, the vase is never the same for. Once you've seen a friend do something appalling, the friendship is never the same. That does not mean you won't go to the theater, or keep the vase or the friend. You can choose.

Sometimes books don't find us until the right time.

Sometimes a good idea comes to you when you are not looking for it. Through an improbable combination of coincidence, naivete and lucky mistakes.

You dig in and you find something.

Hopefully, the people that would look at a Good Charlotte record and dismiss it for maybe what they think is a certain kind of content, if they do discover something meaningful, then it's a nice surprise. I like those kinds of contradictions.

Truth is something you stumble into when you think you're going someplace else.

You'll be scandalized in the morning when you can think again.

Why the hell didn't I know about this?

Who knows what may lie around the next corner? There may be a window somewhere ahead. It may look out on a field of sunflowers.

I first came across Chadron, Nebraska, by accident in 1994.

Happiness is sitting down to watch some slides of your neighbor's vacation and finding out that he spent two weeks in a nudist colony.

The thing with your heart's desire is that your heart doesn't even know what it desires until it turns up. Like a tie at a tag sale, some perfect thing in a crate of nothing, you were just there, uninvited, and now suddenly the party was over and you were all I wanted. I hadn't even been looking, not for you, and now you were my heart's desire.

What people call serendipity sometimes is just having your eyes open.

The inflated imitations of gold and silver, which after the rapture are thrown into the fire, all is exhausted and dissipated by the debt. All scrips and bonds are wiped out. At the fourth pillar dedicated to Saturn, split by earthquake and flood: vexing everyone, an urn of gold is found and then restored.

I've been surprised by Austin. I had a cowboy image of the place. It's a pretty sophisticated city - in some ways, more sophisticated than Boston. And there's a lighter feel to the place. It's very good for my spirits.

There are only two good outcomes for a quest like this, the hope of the serendipitous savant — sail for Asia and stumble on America — and the hope of scarecrows and tin men: that you find out you had the thing you sought all along.

2 Guys in a health club, one is putting on pantyhose. "Since when do you wear pantyhose?" "Since my wife found it in the glove compartment!"

faith is like love; when you want it you can't find it, and you find it when you least expect it.

A breeze blows up, touching my cheek like a little child's kiss. It flutters a piece of paper. "Trash, out there? Must belong to one of us." We move closer, and when I reached for it, I find...... a perfect paper airplane.