Discovery Quotes

...suddenly you hit on something that the student really responds to, you can see the eyes open and the complexion change. The life possibility has opened there. All you can say to yourself is, "I hope this child hangs on to that."

While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognitato them,... Champlain, the first Governor of Canada,... had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England.

The history of scientific and technical discovery teaches us that the human race is poor in independent and creative imagination. Even when the external and scientific requirements for the birth of an idea have long been there, it generally needs an external stimulus to make it actually happen; man has, so to speak, to stumble right up against the thing before the idea comes.

The mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that 'W-A-T-E-R' meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, joy, set it free.

Science finds it methods.

What lead me more or less directly to the special theory of relativity was the conviction that the electromotive force acting on a body in motion in a magnetic field was nothing else but an electric field.

Reason is the slow and torturous method by which those who do not know the truth discover it

You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.

In order to find, you must first search.

We can know a lot. And still, no doubt, there are rash and wonderful ideas brewing somewhere; there are many surprises yet to come.

Life is what matters, life alone - the continuous, eternal process of discovering life - and not the discovery itself.

You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure.

In our day we don't allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel. If somebody should discover a creek in the county next to the one that the North Pole is in, Europe and America would start fifteen costly expeditions thither; one to explore the creek, and the other fourteen to hunt for each other.

Wonder [admiratio astonishment, marvel] is a kind of desire for knowledge. The situation arises when one sees an effect and does not know its cause, or when the cause of the particular effect is one that exceeds his power of understanding. Hence, wonder is a cause of pleasure insofar as there is annexed the hope of attaining understanding of that which one wants to know. ... For desire is especially aroused by the awareness of ignorance, and consequently a man takes the greatest pleasure in those things which he discovers for himself or learns from the ground up.

I sing the body that is electric! I celebrate the Self yet to be unveiled!

I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.

I try to paint what I have found and not what I look for. In art, intentions are of little importance.

Truth strikes us from behind and in the dark, as well as from before and in broad daylight.

You may not be able to do all you find out, but make sure you find out all you can do.

Children's as good as 'rithmetic to set you findin' out things.

If you are trying to find something, it means you haven't got it. And if you find it simply by looking for it, that means it's false.

Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction

A great commotion immobilized her in her center of gravity, planted her in her place, and her defensive will was demolished by the irresistible anxiety to discover what the orange bells and whistles and the invisible globes on the other side of death were like.

There is always something new coming out of Africa.

Galileo had already made a significant beginning toward a knowledge of the law of motion. He discovered the law of inertia and the law of bodies falling freely in the gravitational field of the earth.

The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one!

Set yourself earnestly to discover what you are made to do, and then give yourself passionately to the doing of it.

You sit and you let your fingers go to wherever they are going to go. You wait until you start to hear something, and you start to figure out what it is that you're doing. And then you add another piece next to that piece, and wait to see if some kind of pattern or something interesting starts to grow, and then you cultivate it.

If you know exactly what you're going to do, what's the good in doingit?

To know what you're going to draw, you have to begin drawing.

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.

Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.

Explore. Dream. Discover.

A breeze discovered my open book And began to flutter the leaves to look

Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time.

The real quality of our life is not determined by what we have won from it, but by what we have discovered within it.

[Science is] piecemeal revelation.

You see, if the height of the mercury [barometer] column is less on the top of a mountain than at the foot of it (as I have many reasons for believing, although everyone who has so far written about it is of the contrary opinion), it follows that the weight of the air must be the sole cause of the phenomenon, and not that abhorrence of a vacuum, since it is obvious that at the foot of the mountain there is more air to have weight than at the summit, and we cannot possibly say that the air at the foot of the mountain has a greater aversion to empty space than at the top.

Old sciences are unraveled like old stockings, by beginning at the foot.

The process of discovery is very simple. An unwearied and systematic application of known laws to nature, causes the unknown to reveal themselves. Almost any mode of observation will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method.

... by indirections find directions out.

There is seldom just one cockroach in the kitchen. You know, you turn on the light and, all of sudden, they all start scurrying around.

For many years, at great cost, I traveled through many countries, saw the high mountains, the oceans. The only things I did not see were the sparkling dewdrops in the grass just outside my door.

Science is the topography of ignorance.

There are places where the mind dies so that a truth which is its very denial may be born.

How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact!

The gates of thought, - how slow and late they discover themselves! Yet when they appear, we see that they were always there, always open.

The wonders of nature are endless.

I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.

Wherever primitive man put up a word, he believed he had made a discovery. How utterly mistaken he really was! He had touched a problem, and while supposing he had solved it, he had created and obstacle to its solution. Now, with every new knowledge we stumble over flint-like and petrified words and, in so doing, break a leg sooner than a word.

There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.

How insidious Nature is when one is trying to get at it experimentally.

A traveler who looks at things with an impartial eye may see what the oldest inhabitant has not observed.

You can't wait for the perfect situation. Find something you love. People you love. And get out there and you'll discover it.

The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths--but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.

It [discovering Finnish] was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.

We have great work ahead of us, and it needs devotion and much, much energy. To grow, to discover, we need involvement, which is something I experience every day - sometimes good, sometimes frustrating. No matter what, you must let your inner light guide you out of the darkness.

Let us rejoice in the truth, wherever we find its lamp burning.