There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

I don’t have any terrific self-esteem issues but I do sometimes realise I’ve been too lucky and that I’m over-praised. It makes me nervous. I have this sense of being overrated.

Whatever fortune has raised to a height, she has raised only to cast it down.

You’re unlikely to discover something new without a lot of practice on old stuff, but further, you should get a heck of a lot of fun out of working out funny relations and interesting things.

The best luck of all is the luck you make for yourself.

I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfil our destiny, but our fate is sealed.

Though men determine, the gods doo dispose: and oft times many things fall out betweene the cup and the lip.

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.

To win a national championship, you’ve got to be a little lucky.

There are many events in the womb of time, which will be delivered.

If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be reached by search or trail.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

Not all those who wander are lost.

I’ve had quite a lot of luck with dreams. I’ve often awoken in the night with a phrase or even a whole song in my head.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

I joyfully hasten to meet death. If it come before I have had opportunity to develop all my artistic faculties, it will come, my hard fate notwithstanding, too soon, and I should probably wish it later – yet even then I shall be happy, for will it not deliver me from a state of endless suffering?

Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.

Richard Burton came from the same town as me, so I thought I’d follow my nose, and follow my luck. I think I’ve been very lucky.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

Humor has bailed me out of more tight situations than I can think of. If you go with your instincts and keep your humor, creativity follows. With luck, success comes, too.

I think the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles would revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow’s nest of that ship.

I’ve been very lucky. I come from a very close family.

Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.

If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.

I’m lucky that, despite all the bad press I’ve had over the years, the public still seems to like me.

Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.

Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore be demanded back the next hour.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

I think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they’re good or there because they’re lucky.

A man’s character is his fate.

A consistent soul believes in destiny, a capricious one in chance.

I have discovered that my interest in my dear pupil, Mabel, has ripened into a far deeper feeling than that of mere friendship. In fact, I know that I have learned to love her very sincerely.

You want to do good things, and once you’ve done a couple of good things in a row, you think ‚Well gee, let’s not mess this up.‘ But I am lucky at this point that I have something I really love to do, and it completely holds my attention. I never feel frustrated by it.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates.

I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‚Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.‘

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate… but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

Men do not shape destiny, Destiny produces the man for the hour.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.

I’ve found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often.

Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible.

I was extremely lucky that I had two great wives. It sounds a bit funny to say that, but it’s absolutely true.

When it’s your time, it is your time.

Today, we’re still loaded down – and, to some extent, embarrassed – by ancient myths, but we respect them as part of the same impulse that has led to the modern, scientific kind of myth. But we now have the opportunity to discover, for the first time, the way the universe is in fact constructed as opposed to how we would wish it to be constructed.

How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing, nobody had said it before.

When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.

I am not solicitous to examine particularly everything here, which indeed could not be done in fifty years, because my desire is to make all possible discoveries, and return to your Highnesses, if it please our Lord, in April.