Serendipity Quotes

“Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Do you think the universe fights for souls to be together?
Some things are too strange and strong to be coincidences.”
― Emery Allen

“Vital lives are about action. You can't feel warmth unless you create it, can't feel delight until you play, can't know serendipity unless you risk.”
― Joan Erickson

“There isn't any questioning the fact that some people enter your life, at the exact point of need, want or desire - it's sometimes a coincendence and most times fate, but whatever it is, I am certain it came to make me smile.”
― Nikki Rowe

“It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold

“Sometimes serendipity is just intention unmasked.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

“But in Friendship, being free of all that, we think we have chosen our peers. In reality, a few years' difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, posting to different regiments, the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting—any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you," can truly say to every group of Christian friends "You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another." The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by Friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if "a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics".

To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos. Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on. It happens that you need to set thirtysomething knobs to fully describe the world about us. The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile.

Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn't exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life.”
― Paul Davies

“With a library it is easier to hope for serendipity than to look for a precise answer.”
― Lemony Snicket, When Did You See Her Last?

“I can't explain why your name seems so familiar to me, or why it feels like I've heard your voice a thousand times before, but I can explain this ~ your the type of chaos Id bleed for.”
― Nikki Rowe

“The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.”
― Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory In Crisis

“In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.”
― Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

“Our hearts speak the same language but more importantly our souls share the same voice.”
― Nikki Rowe

“The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process.”
― William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design

“He was the one I wasn't looking for.”
― Nikki Rowe

“You be you and I'll be me, today and today and today, and let's trust the future to tomorrow. Let the stars keep track of us. Let us ride our own orbits and trust that they will meet. May our reunion be not a finding but a sweet collision of destinies!”
― Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl

“Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.”
― William A. Dembski

“If tragedy never entered our lives, we wouldn't appreciate the magic.”
― Nikki Rowe

“Throughout this journey of life we meet many people along the way.
Each one has a purpose in our life.
No one we meet is ever a coincidence.”
― Mimi Novic

“It made you wonder: How much of our lives was just luck or good timing, and how much was actually choice? How could it be that tiny serendipitous events could change everything? And if lucky events could change everything, could minor mishaps have the same power?”
― Aditi Khorana, Mirror in the Sky

“It's all a series of serendipities
with no beginnings and no ends.
Such infinitesimal possibilities
Through which love transcends.”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, The Tao of Physical and Spiritual

“The theory of phlogiston was an inversion of the true nature of combustion. Removing phlogiston was in reality adding oxygen, while adding phlogiston was actually removing oxygen. The theory was a total misrepresentation of reality. Phlogiston did not even exist, and yet its existence was firmly believed and the theory adhered to rigidly for nearly one hundred years throughout the eighteenth century. ... As experimentation continued the properties of phlogiston became more bizarre and contradictory. But instead of questioning the existence of this mysterious substance it was made to serve more comprehensive purposes. ... For the skeptic or indeed to anyone prepared to step out of the circle of Darwinian belief, it is not hard to find inversions of common sense in modern evolutionary thought which are strikingly reminiscent of the mental gymnastics of the phlogiston chemists or the medieval astronomers.

To the skeptic, the proposition that the genetic programmes of higher organisms, consisting of something close to a thousand million bits of information, equivalent to the sequence of letters in a small library of one thousand volumes, containing in encoded form countless thousands of intricate algorithms controlling, specifying and ordering the growth and development of billions and billions of cells into the form of a complex organism, were composed by a purely random process is simply an affront to reason. But to the Darwinist the idea is accepted without a ripple of doubt - the paradigm takes precedence!”
― Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory In Crisis

“Give your all to every experience, feel it breathe it appreciate it, nothing lasts forever, when it's gone you'll remember the feeling it once gave you and sometimes that's enough.”
― Nikki Rowe

“Nothing in childhood is ever wasted.”
― Bruce Dickinson, What Does This Button Do?: An Autobiography

“Ci eravamo incontrati perché doveva succedere, e anche se non fosse stato quel giorno, prima o poi ci saremmo sicuramente incontrati da qualche altra parte.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“There is no greater inspiration to a life than finding and following its valuable path.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“Serendipity is not the product of patience; it’s the product of action.”
― Audrey Moralez

“I am a force for good, and I can empathize with others without losing my position and well-being”
― Leo Lourdes, A World of Yoga: 700 Asanas for Mindfulness and Well-Being

“If you change direction when there are shadows, you will always find light”
― Leo Lourdes, A World of Yoga: 700 Asanas for Mindfulness and Well-Being

“The blessing of Google is its uncanny skill in finding what you're looking for; the curse is that it so rarely finds any of those lovely odd things you're -not- looking for. For that pleasure, it seems, we need -books.-

(Bran Flakes and Harmless Drudges)”
― Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant