Chance Encounters Quotes

• Chance encounters are what keep us going.

  Haruki Murakami

  Life, Encounters, Chance

  "Kafka on the Shore". Book by Haruki Murakami, 2002.

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• However, I had a chance encounter with an admissions officer of Stevens Institute of Technology, who so impressed me by his erudition and enthusiasm for the school that I changed course and entered Stevens Institute.

  Frederick Reines

  School, Technology, Encounters

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• As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.

  Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont

  Beauty, Beautiful, Encounters

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• History is often the tale of small moments—chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence—that seem of little consequence at the time, but somehow fuse with other small moments to produce something momentous, the proverbial flapping of a butterfly’s wings that triggers a hurricane.

  Scott Anderson

  Butterfly, Wings, Decision

  Scott Anderson (2013). “Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East”, p.89, Anchor

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• Did you ever observe to whom the accidents happen? Chance favors only the prepared mind.

  Louis Pasteur

  Past, Mind, Favors

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• I believe that I am guided by chance encounters. I believe in the miracle of chance encounters.

  Paulo Coelho

  Life, Inspiration, Believe

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• Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which - miraculously, it seems - merge into a significant event.

  Arthur Koestler

  Two, Encounters, May

  "Bricks to Babel: Selected Writings". Book by Arthur Koestler, 1980.

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• The best kind of travel – the kind I wanted to experience – involves a particular state of mind, in which one is not merely open to the occurrence of the unexpected, but to deep involvement in the unexpected, indeed, open to the possibility of having one’s life changed forever by a chance encounter.

  Elisabeth Eaves

  Life Changing, Forever, Mind

  Elisabeth Eaves (2011). “Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents”, p.185, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which-miraculously, it seems-merge into a significant event. It provides the neatest paradigm of the bisociation of previously separate contexts, engineered by fate. Coincidences are puns of destiny. In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot; in the coincidental happening, two strings of events are knitted together by invisible hands.

  Arthur Koestler

  Fate, Destiny, Hands

  "Bricks to Babel". Book by Arthur Koestler, 1980.

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• If there is no fate and our interactions depend on such a complex system of chance encounters, what potentially important connections do we fail to make? What life changing relationships or passionate and lasting love affairs are lost to chance?

  Simon Pegg

  Life Changing, Fate, Important

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• It is often interesting, in retrospect, to consider the trifling causes that lead to great events. A chance encounter, a thoughtless remark - and the tortuous chain reaction of coincidence is set in motion, leading with devious inevitability to some resounding climax.

  Patricia Moyes

  Interesting, Retrospect, Causes

  Patricia Moyes (1961). “Down Among the Dead Men”

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• You find photographs in so many different ways - from chance encounters, from looking at your negatives, from the way the light hits your pillow in your home, from a sound or a movement that makes you look... It’s whatever draws you or makes you feel something. Then, the picture is only good if it has a life of its own. Every photo is almost a fiction or a dream. If it’s really good, it’s another form of life.

  Sylvia Plachy

  Dream, Home, Light

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• All my photographs are about meetings and about coups de foudre - love at first sight. To do that type of photography, one must wipe the canvas clean to prepare for chance encounters, be open and aware to such moments, otherwise it becomes a cliché - already seen and expected.

  Edouard Boubat

  Photography, Sight, Encounters

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• Every day you run into artists on the streets in SoHo or other creative people you want to do something with. There's nothing to match that chance encounter.

  Jeffrey Deitch

  Running, Artist, People

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• Theirs [the Beatles] is a happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless brand of harmonic primitivism... In the Liverpudlian repertoire, the indulged amateurishness of the musical material, though closely rivaled by the indifference of the performing style, is actually surpassed only by the ineptitude of the studio production method. (Strawberry Fields suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band.)

  Glenn Gould

  Cocky, Musical, Style

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• In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms." I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently. "I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms.

  Haruki Murakami

  Mean, Thinking, Compassion

  FaceBook post by Haruki Murakami from Jul 16, 2011

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• It was a chance encounter with a biotech entrepreneur from Ireland that got me started as an entrepreneur in India, because I partnered this Irish company in setting up India's first biotech company.

  Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

  Entrepreneur, India, Encounters

  "$800 million biotech business started in a garage" by Becky Anderson, www.cnn.com. November 15, 2012.

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• To exist without purpose is to be at the mercy of the chance encounter, the chance invitation, the chance phone call, the chance event- always being controlled by forces external to oneself.

  Nathaniel Branden

  Phones, Encounters, Events

  Nathaniel Branden (1998). “Nathaniel Brandens Self-Esteem Every Day: Reflections on Self-Esteem and Spirituality”, p.221, Simon and Schuster

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• Eyes Wide Open' took shape from two real life events straight from my own past. One was the sad suicide of my young nephew, a troubled kid, who was found at the bottom of a landmark cliff in central California. The second was a chance encounter forty years ago with none other than, ahem, Charles Manson!

  Andrew Gross

  Suicide, Real, Kids

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• Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgement does its work with difficulty; it is entirely lacking in me.... Now,the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Memories, Confused, Self

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