discovery quotes

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.

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.

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

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

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

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

Not all those who wander are lost.

From the point of view of basic physics, the most interesting phenomena are, of course, in the new places, the places where the rules do not work – not the places where they do work! That is the way in which we discover new rules.

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

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.

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.

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.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.

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 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 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.

There’ll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.

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

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.

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.

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.

After having dispatched a meal, I went ashore, and found no habitation save a single house, and that without an occupant; we had no doubt that the people had fled in terror at our approach, as the house was completely furnished.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Science is magic that works.