"Cast your net wide. Speculate recklessly. Speak to the wide-eyed. Sink your ship. Build it anew. Burn your agreements. Watch the ashes rise."

"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name."

"In the eyes of many human beings, life appears to be a unique and special phenome­non. There is, of course, some truth to this belief, since no other planet is known to bear a rich and complex biosphere. However, this view betrays an “organic chauvinism” that leads us to underestimate the vitality of the processes of self­-organization in other spheres of reality. It can also make us forget that, despite the many differences between them, living creatures and their inorganic counter­ parts share a crucial dependence on intense flows of energy and materials. In many respects the circulation is what matters, not the particular forms that it causes to emerge."

"I suppose I have a vision of a universe that we’re increasingly able to understand through science — and that includes understanding who we are, where we came from, and why we do the things we do. What drives me is the desire to explore both the details of this vision, for their own sake — things like quantum mechanics and cosmology, simply because they’re beautiful and elaborate and fascinating — but also the ways in which we can adapt to this situation, and use what we’re learning constructively."

serendipity (n.)

“faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries,” a rare word before 20c., coined by Horace Walpole in a letter to Horace Mann dated Jan. 28, 1754, but which apparently was not published until 1833.

Walpole said he formed the word from the Persian fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip” (an English version was published in 1722) whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of” [Walpole].

Serendip, (also Serendib), attested by 1708 in English, is an old name for Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka), from Arabic Sarandib, from Sanskrit Simhaladvipa “Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island.”

Attention was called to the word in an article in The Saturday Review of June 16, 1877 [“An ungrateful world has probably almost forgotten Horace Walpole’s attempt to enrich the English language with the term "Serendipity.” etc.]; it begins to turn up in publication 1890s but still is not in Century Dictionary (1902) .

—https://www.etymonline.com/word/serendipity