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.

I am proud to have been born in Iowa. Through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy, it was a place of adventure and daily discoveries – the wonder of the growing crops, the excitements of the harvest, the journeys to the woods for nuts and hunting, the joys of snowy winters, the comfort of the family fireside, of good food and tender care.

Communism to me is one-third practice and two-thirds explanation.

There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.

On a spiritual level, it’s as though with my sighted eye I see what’s before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what’s hidden. It’s illuminated life more than darkened it.

A hundred struggle and drown in the breakers. One discovers the new world. But rather, ten times rather, die in the surf, heralding the way to that new world, than stand idly on the shore.

Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.

The Joker that Christopher Nolan created in ‚The Dark Knight‘ had the scar across his mouth, and the first time you heard his explanation for it, he makes you believe that’s how he got it. But then you get into the film, and every time he talks about his scar, it’s a totally different story.

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

I do not think psychoanalysis has a scientific basis. If we can’t explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?

I believe that there are many herbs and many trees that are worth much in Europe for dyes and for medicines; but I do not know, and this causes me great sorrow. Arriving at this cape, I found the smell of the trees and flowers so delicious that it seemed the pleasantest thing in the world.

I give infinite thanks to God, who has been pleased to make me the first observer of marvelous things.

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.

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

Globalization has made copper and other minerals more valuable, and Ghana and Kenya have recently discovered mineral resources.

My desire was not to pass any island without taking possession, so that, one having been taken, the same may be said of all.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

I think you can have 10,000 explanations for failure, but no good explanation for success.

Hypotheses should be subservient only in explaining the properties of things but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

Never explain – your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

I found that part of it towards San Salvador extending from north to south five leagues, and the other side which we coasted along, ran from east to west more than ten leagues.

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions – for the fun of it – then one day you’ll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.

Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.

Perhaps, as some wit remarked, the best proof that there is Intelligent Life in Outer Space is the fact it hasn’t come here. Well, it can’t hide forever – one day we will overhear it.

No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‚Eureka!‘ but ‚That’s funny…‘

The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences, and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves: nothing original, pristine, clear.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful: they are found because it was possible to find them.

It takes a wise man to discover a wise man.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

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.

Sometimes, when I see my granddaughters make small discoveries of their own, I wish I were a child.

The Indians on board said that thence to Cuba was a voyage in their canoes of a day and a half; these being small dug-outs without a sail. Such are their canoes. I departed thence for Cuba, for by the signs the Indians made of its greatness, and of its gold and pearls, I thought that it must be Cipango.

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

Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

There isn’t any formula or method. You learn to love by loving – by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.

Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain.

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

When trying to remember my share in the glow of the eternal present, in the smile of God, I return to my childhood, too, for that is where the most significant discoveries turn up.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.

In the history of medicine, it is not always the great scientist or the learned doctor who goes forward to discover new fields, new avenues, new ideas.

The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

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

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.

The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.