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

Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket – half a million dollars. It can be done.

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.

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.

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

Cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

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.

We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.

What’s important in Libya is, first of all, it has a good deal of oil. A lot of the country is unexplored; there may be a lot more. And it’s very high-quality oil, so very valuable.

I’m one of the most adaptable guys I know in as much as travelling is my favourite thing to do in life. With every place I go, I try to stay there long enough to do it justice, long enough so that I can at least imagine what it would be like to live there. Once I imagine that, then it’s OK for me to return home.

We are often raised as dependents then given over to teachers. It’s experience and exploration that can transform us and lead to mastery.

With all the travel we’re doing to cold-weather cities, your mind definitely starts to wander. It gets you away from the game. Even when you arrive in a city, you’re tempted to just sit in your hotel and rest. Sometimes it’s nice to just get out and walk around, to see what’s there.

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

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!

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 did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, in the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force, in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts. And so it was that they soon understood us, and we them, either by speech or by signs, and they have been very serviceable.

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

I love all kinds of insects, and I’ve heard Australia has some really interesting bugs.

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I’ve come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

Women have a certain sexuality, and I think their bodies are beautiful, and I’m not embarrassed to explore that in a film. But there are things you get offered that are vulgar and violent – just like there’s a side of me that’s vulgar and violent.

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.

The balloons only have one life and the only way of finding out whether they work is to attempt to fly around the world.

Of course humans like to explore, and we should. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s more than that. It’s essential for your children and your children’s children.

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.

Truth is a pathless land.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

Fashion has become so whatever. I don’t think there are any stones left to unturn.

Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

I could do one show after another in China for the rest of my life and still die ignorant. There’s a lot of places left to go.

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

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

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

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves – and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.

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.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

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

I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses.

I was born on January 8, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. I estimate, however, that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day. I don’t know whether any of them was later interested in astronomy.

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

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.

Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

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.

It is better to travel well than to arrive.

It’s not a real adventure when you have to pay for it.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

Anytime I feel lost, I pull out a map and stare. I stare until I have reminded myself that life is a giant adventure, so much to do, to see.

To be able to travel the world, especially to places I never thought I’d be… it’s really, you know, still fascinating for me.

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

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

What I’m trying to do is, is to make a significant difference in space flight. And help make space flight accessible to almost anyone.

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

Sometimes the greatest meals on vacations are the ones you find when Plan A falls through.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

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