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

I have often been downcast but never in despair; I regard our hiding as a dangerous adventure, romantic and interesting at the same time. In my diary, I treat all the privations as amusing.

I think any life can be interesting, any surroundings can be interesting. I don’t think I could have been so brave if I had been living in a town, competing with people on what can be called a generally higher cultural level.

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 feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.

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.

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

My discovery that black holes emit radiation raised serious problems of consistency with the rest of physics. I have now resolved these problems, but the answer turned out to be not what I expected.

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

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

The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that’s the most interesting: the part that doesn’t go according to what you expected.

Trying to be fascinating is an asinine position to be in.

The North East has always been the hub to produce few of the best talents in the country and it is great for the people from the hills to have their own local club to cheer for considering the kind of passion they have for the game.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

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.

When I used to play sports, I’d be the one cheering the team on, ‚Come on, we can beat these guys!‘ That’s just in me.

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

I’m someone who likes plowing new ground, then walking away from it. I get bored easily. For me, the big thrill comes with the discovering.

Time discovers truth.

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

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.

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.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

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

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.

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

Only the really plain people know about love – the very fascinating ones try so hard to create an impression that they soon exhaust their talents.

The chimpanzee study was – well, it’s still going on, and I think it’s taught us perhaps more than anything else to be a little humble; that we are, indeed, unique primates, we humans, but we’re simply not as different from the rest of the animal kingdom as we used to think.

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.

It takes a wise man to discover a wise man.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

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

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.

The alchemists in their search for gold discovered many other things of greater value.

There are trees of a thousand sorts, and all have their several fruits; and I feel the most unhappy man in the world not to know them, for I am well assured that they are all valuable. I bring home specimens of them, and also of the land.

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

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

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.

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.

I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

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

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

The quantity and quality of consciousness, one may say, have always been growing throughout geological times. In this respect man, in whom nervous organisation and therefore psychological powers have attained an undisputed maximum, may be considered, scientifically, as a natural centre of evolution of the primates.

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can’t stand it.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

I miss the early days; I do. I was so lucky. I basically had it to myself, learning about these chimpanzees. Nobody knew anything about them. Discovering their different personalities, different life histories. I was lucky.