Quotes about discovery

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“Think this: My Soul knows exactly what it is doing.
Also, think this: My Soul already knows what really matters.
So it is not a question of “finding” that answer, it is a question of remembering. It is not a process of discovery, it is a process of recovery. This data does not have to be researched, it merely has to be retrieved.”

“There is no better high than discovery.”

“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.”

“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.”

“The ragamuffin who sees his life as a voyage of discovery and runs the risk of failure has a better feel for faithfulness than the timid man who hides behind the law and never finds out who he is at all.”

“… maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.”

“We are made of stellar ash. Our origin and evolution have been tied to distant cosmic events. The exploration of the cosmos is a voyage of self-discovery.”

“Live to discover, as long as discovery leads to a love that comes from the Creator… writing was the mirror to life.”

“Writing is the act of discovery.”

“Life is chaotic and unpredictable. If a butterfly flaps its wings in
one part of the world, it could cause people at the opposite end of the globe to watch a Discovery Channel special on butterflies”

“The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance”

“Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.”

“Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.”

“All great discoveries… are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.”

“The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human can alter his life by altering his attitude.”

“Saturday morning was their unrestricted television time, and they usually took advantage of it to watch a series of cartoon shows that would certainly have been impossible before the discovery of LSD.”

“I dropped all the guards. All the leashes, all the chains, everything that ever restrained me through the discipline and fear of discovery, I let it all go. No need to hide.”

“I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.”

“Without a constant misuse of language, there cannot be any discovery, any progress.”

“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.”

“later down the road of life, i made the discovery that salt water was also good for the mental abrasions one inevitably acquires on land.”

“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”

“the identity of an individual is essentially a function of her choices, rather than the discovery of an immutable attribute”

“I make a new discovery that totally blows; dying is the easy part. It's coming back to life that sucks.”

“Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.”

“Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.”

“… one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage.”

“Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.”

“I mean, how would anyone learn anything if they weren't curious? How would scientists make discoveries? -- We all have the right to be different, don't we?”

“The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.”

“There is no greater discovery than seeing God as the author of your destiny.”

“Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance.”

“My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before — a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.”

“Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.”

“One of the greatest discoveries a person makes, one of their great surprises, is to find they can do what they were afraid they couldn't do.”

“I've made the most important discovery of my life. It's only in the mysterious equation of love that any logic or reasons can be found.”

“I want to make my own discoveries……. penetrate the evil which attracts me”

“One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries.”

“We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.”

“For I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that the effort to instruct myself had no effect other than the increasing discovery of my own ignorance”

“For you, my darlings, freedom to do what you like is the discovery of how unlikable what you like to do makes you. Not that that stops you doing what you like, since you like doing what you like more than you like liking what you do…
[Lucifer]”

“This is a mournful discovery.
1)Those who agree with you are insane
2)Those who do not agree with you are in power.”

“Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.”

“The more original a discovery the more obvious it seems afterwards.”

“We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.”

“The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.”

“It is not advisable to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.”

“Writing is more about discovery than invention.”

“Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”

“The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race than the discovery of a star.”

“we can harness the energy of the winds, the seas, the sun. But the day man learns to harness the energy of love, that will be as important as the discovery of fire.”

“Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.”

“Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur.”

“Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery — what it all means…”

“Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things.”

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

“Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination”

“The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why.”

“The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.”

“Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.”

“It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception.”

“When I write, I make discoveries about my feelings.”

“As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.”

“A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.”

“Helped are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.”

“The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wraith of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them: 'The world is round, like an orange.”

“Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.”

“To estimate the value of Newton's discoveries, or the delight communicated by Shakespeare and Milton, by the price at which their works have sold, would be but a poor measure of the degree in which they have elevated and enchanted their country; nor would it be less grovelling and incongruous to estimate the benefit which the country has derived from the Revolution of 1688, by the pay of the soldiers, and all other payments concerned in effecting it.”

“The European discovery rather than Aboriginal occupation constitutes Australia's pre-history. Australia - its economy, society and polity - is a construction of European civilisation. Australia did not exist when traditional Aborigines occupied the continent. Aborigines have been participants in Australian history, but that story begins with all the others in 1788.”

“Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness. That state is most fortunate in its form of government which has the aptest instruments for the discovery of law.”

“Science develops best when its concepts and conclusions are integrated into the broader human culture and its concerns for ultimate meaning and value. Scientists cannot, therefore, hold themselves entirely aloof from the sorts of issues dealt with by philosophers and theologians. By devoting to these issues something of the energy and care they give to their research in science, they can help others realize more fully the human potentialities of their discoveries. They can also come to appreciate for themselves that these discoveries cannot be a genuine substitute for knowledge of the truly ultimate. Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”

“I mistrust illuminations: what we take for a discovery is very often only a familiar thought that we have not recognized.”

“In the history of madness, two events signal this change with singular clarity: in 1657, the founding of the Hôpital Général, and the Great Confinement of the poor; and in 1794, the liberation of the mad in chains at Bicêtre. Between these two singular and symmetrical events, something happened, whose ambiguity has perplexed historians of medicine: blind repression in an absolutist regime, according to some, and, according to others, the progressive discovery, by science and philanthropy, of madness in its positive truth. In fact, beneath these reversible meanings, a structure was taking shape, which did not undo that ambiguity but was decisive for it. This structure explains the passage from the medieval and humanist experience of madness to the experience that is our own, which confines madness in mental illness.”

“When the Nobel award was announced I saw it as a personal triumph, an achievement for me and my collaborators -- a recognition for a very remarkable discovery, for reaching the goal I had pursued for 7 years. But when I sat in that crowded hall and I saw the sea of western faces surrounding me, and I, the only Indian, in my turban and closed coat, it dawned on me that I was really representing my people and my country. I felt truly humble when I received the Prize from King Gustav; it was a moment of great emotion but I could restrain myself.”

“The Court today finds that the Powers That Be, up in Albany, have conspired to effect an establishment of the Satmar Hasidim. I do not know who would be more surprised at this discovery: the Founders of our Nation or Grand Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, founder of the Satmar. The Grand Rebbe would be astounded to learn that after escaping brutal persecution and coming to America with the modest hope of religious toleration for their ascetic form of Judaism, the Satmar had become so powerful, so closely allied with Mammon, as to have become an establishment of the Empire State. And the Founding Fathers would be astonished to find that the Establishment Clause — which they designed to insure that no one powerful sect or combination of sects could use political or governmental power to punish dissenters — has been employed to prohibit characteristically and admirably American accommodation of the religious practices (or more precisely, cultural peculiarities) of a tiny minority sect. I, however, am not surprised. Once this Court has abandoned text and history as guides, nothing prevents it from calling religious toleration the establishment of religion.”

“If we find, when we read again one of our classics—say Virgil for instance—that we like it better than ever, the experience may suggest an even more pleasing conjecture. Psychologists tell us that fullness of life is the goal of everything that lives, that the impulse towards completeness, towards ripeness and self-realization, is the most compelling of all motives. These discoveries in old books of new beauties and aspects of interest may persuade us, therefore, that we are not only still ourselves, but more ourselves than ever: that our spirit has not only persisted in its being, but has become more lucid in the process.”

“The discoveries of modern science do not disagree with the oldest traditions which claim an incredible antiquity for our race.”

“Our basic problem is that we have three levels, I would say, of moral beliefs. We have the first instance, our intuitive moral feelings which are adapted to the small, person-to-person society where we act for people whom we know and are served by people whom we know. Then, we have a society governed by moral traditions which, unlike what modern rationalists believe, are not intellectual discoveries of men who designed them, but as a result of a persons, which I now prefer to describe as term of 'group selection.' Those groups who had accidentally developed such as the tradition of private property and the family who did succeed, but never understood this. So we owe our present extended order of human cooperation very largely to a moral tradition which the intellectual does not approve of, because it has never been intellectually designed and it has to compete with a third level of moral beliefs, those which the morals which the intellectuals designed in the hope that they can better satisfy man's instincts than the traditional morals to do. And we live in a world where three moral traditions are in constant conflict, the innate ones, the traditional ones, and the intellectually designed ones, and ultimately, all our political conflicts of this time can be reduced as affected by a conflict between free moral tradition of a different nature, not only of different content.”

“The Gutenberg galaxy was theoretically dissolved in 1905 with the discovery of curved space, but in practice it had been invaded by the telegraph two generations before that.”

“And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice – based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudices and muddled folk wisdom – how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!”

“Man's excellence lies in his readiness to let others live and lay down his own life. As he progresses, his food also changes for the better. He has the capacity to grow still further. There have been many more discoveries after Darwin's. The book which you have been reading seems to be an old one. Whether it is old or new, the "Principle of the greatest good of the greatest number," or "survival of the fittest" is false.”

“I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions — only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk.”

“Most, if not all, of the great ideas of modern mathematics have had their origin in observation. Take, for instance, the arithmetical theory of forms, of which the foundation was laid in the diophantine theorems of Fermat, left without proof by their author, which resisted all efforts of the myriad-minded Euler to reduce to demonstration, and only yielded up their cause of being when turned over in the blow-pipe flame of Gauss’s transcendent genius; or the doctrine of double periodicity, which resulted from the observation of Jacobi of a purely analytical fact of transformation; or Legendre’s law of reciprocity; or Sturm’s theorem about the roots of equations, which, as he informed me with his own lips, stared him in the face in the midst of some mechanical investigations connected (if my memory serves me right) with the motion of compound pendulums; or Huyghen’s method of continued fractions, characterized by Lagrange as one of the principal discoveries of that great mathematician, and to which he appears to have been led by the construction of his Planetary Automaton; or the new algebra, speaking of which one of my predecessors (Mr. Spottiswoode) has said, not without just reason and authority, from this chair, “that it reaches out and indissolubly connects itself each year with fresh branches of mathematics, that the theory of equations has become almost new through it, algebraic 31 geometry transfigured in its light, that the calculus of variations, molecular physics, and mechanics” (he might, if speaking at the present moment, go on to add the theory of elasticity and the development of the integral calculus) “have all felt its influence.”

“I wouldn't say that I'm an orthodox Christian at all and the longer we live in the twentieth century the more fantastic discoveries are made, the more we hear what the universe is like I find it very difficult to be a kind of orthodox believer in Jesus as my saviour and that sort of thing. I'm more interested in the extraordinary nature of God. If there is God, if there is deity, then He, even as the old hymn says, He moves in a mysterious way and I'm fascinated by that mystery and I've tried to write out of that experience of God, the fantastic side of God, the quarrel between the conception of God as a person, as having a human side, and the conception of God as being so extraordinary. … So these are still things that occupy me, and every now and again, if you're lucky, you're able to make a poem out of this conception of God … so I suppose I'm trying to appeal to people to open their eyes and their minds to the extraordinary nature of God.”

“In regard to man’s final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. The degree to which this unitive knowledge is achieved here on earth determines the degree to which it will be enjoyed in the posthumous state. Contemplation of truth is the end, action the means.”

“The most important thing I found out from [my father] is that if you asked any question and pursued it deeply enough, then at the end there was a glorious discovery of a general and beautiful kind.”

“And now, at the end of the twentieth century, with the pressure of modern information and the advances of data processing, graphics is passing through a new and fundamental stage. The great difference between the graphic representation of yesterday, which was poorly dissociated from the figurative image, and the graphics of tomorrow, is the disappearance of the congential fixity of the image.
When one can superimpose, juxtapose, transpose, and permute graphic images in ways that lead to groupings and classings, the graphic image passes from the dead image, the 'illustration,' to the living image, the widely accessible research instrument it is now becoming. The graphic is no longer only the 'representation' of a final simplification, it is a point of departure for the discovery of these simplifications and the means for their justification. The graphic has become, by its manageability, an instrument for information processing.”

“The Anarchists most certainly believe in the Church; only they insist that all its work shall be purely voluntary, and that its discoveries and achievements, however beneficial, shall not be imposed upon the individual by authority.”

“Here then (belove reader) thou hast this work devided into two treatises, the first is the said introduction and reasoning, for investigation of the true sense of every cheife Theological tearme and date contained in the Revelation, whereby, not onely is it opened, explained and interpreted, but also that same explanation and interpretation is proved, confirmed and demonstrated, by evidente proofe and coherence of scriptures, agreeable with the event of histories. The seconde is, the principall treatise, in which the whole Apocalyps, Chapter by chapter, Verse by verse, and Sentence by sentence, is both Paraphrastically expounded and Historically applyed. …And because this whole work of Revelation concerneth most the discoverie of the Antichristian and Papisticall kingdome, I have therefore (for removing of all suspition) in al histories and prophane matters, taken my authorities and cited my places either out of Ethnick auctors, or then papistical writers, whose testimonies by no reason can be refuted against themselves. But in matters of divinitie, doctrine & interpretation of mysteries (leaving all opinions of men) I take me onely to the interpretation and discoverie thereof, by coherence of scripture, and godly reasons following thereupon; which also not only no Papist, but even no Christian may justly refuse. And forasmuch as our scripturs herein are of two fortes, the one our ordinary text, the other extraordinary citations; In our ordinary text, I follow not altogether the vulgar English translation, but the best learned in the Greek tong, so that (for satisfying the Papists) I differ nothing from their vulgar text of S. Jerome, as they cal it, except is such places, where I prove by good reasons, that hee differeth from the Original Greek. In the extraordinary texts of other scriptures cited by me, I followe ever Jeromes latine translation, where any controverse stands betwixt us and the Papists, and that moveth me in divers places to insert his very latine text, for their cause, with the just English thereof, for supply of the unlearned.”

“Discovery in mathematics is not a matter of logic. It is rather the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and in which unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs, a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty's sake and pulls it down to earth.”

“If man is created by an external source, then he must belong to that source and not to himself. According to Buddhism, man is responsible for everything he does. Thus Buddhists have no reason to believe that man came into existence in the human form through any external sources. They believe that man is here today because of his own action. He is neither punished nor rewarded by anyone but himself according to his own good and bad action. In the process of evolution, the human being came into existence. However, there are no Buddha-words to support the belief that the world was created by anybody. The scientific discovery of gradual development of the world-system conforms with the Buddha's Teachings.”

“The discovery of new knowledge for ourselves, then, means the assimilation of public information into our unique context of thought. ie can establish relations between ideas and concepts which are not available to anyone else, because no-one else has precisely the same system of information available.”

“Suppose that, by some new discovery, or some improved mode of culture, only one per cent could be added to the annual results of English cultivation; this, of itself, would materially affect the comfortable subsistence of millions of human beings.”

“The Renaissance discovery of nature was an invention of nineteenth-century liberalism which played off the Renaissance delight in nature against the Middle Ages, in order to strike a blow at the romantic philosophy of history. For when Burckhardt says that the ‘discovery of the world and of man’was an achievement of the Renaissance, this thesis is, at the same time, an attack on romantic reaction and an attempt to ward off the propaganda designed to spread the romantic view of medieval culture. The doctrine of the spontaneous naturalism of the Renaissance comes from the same source as the theory that the fight against the spirit of authority and hierarchy, the ideal of freedom of thought and freedom of conscience, the emancipation of the individual and the principle of democracy, are achievements of the fifteenth century. In all this the light of the modern age is contrasted with the darkness of the Middle Ages.”

“The clash between reason and Portuguese experience. Hooykaas' starting point is the intellectual challenge which, from the early 15th century onward, was posed by the discoveries of the Portuguese mariners… There follows an array of fascinating accounts of, and quotations from, works by contemporary authors who were compelled to face as facts numerous phenomena the ancients had been quite sure could not possibly be observed because they were bound not to exist. Examples are Aristotle's denial that the tropics could be inhabited; Ptolemy's mathematically derived conviction that all dry land is confined to part of the Northern Hemisphere, and so on. …In Hooykaas' view we are witnessing here a birth of 'natural history' in the domain of the hard and given fact… The narrow world of sense-data to which the ancient natural philosophers had confined their all-too-rational speculations was now being blown to pieces. And this was not being done by fellow natural philosophers, but rather at the urging of scarcely literate sailors!”

“The idea for [his sculpture] 'The Warrior' came to me at the end of 1952 or very early in 1953. It was evolved from a pebble I found on the seashore in the summer of 1952, and which reminded me of the stump of a leg, amputated at the hip. Just as Leonardo says somewhere in his notebooks that a painter can find a battle scene in the lichen marks on a wall, so this gave me the start of The Warrior idea. First I added the body, leg and one arm and it became a wounded warrior, but at first the figure was reclining. A day or two later I added a shield and altered its position and arrangement into a seated figure and so it changed from an inactive pose into a figure which, though wounded, is still defiant... The head has a blunted and bull-like power but also a sort of dumb animal acceptance and forbearance of pain... The figure may be emotionally connected (as one critic has suggested) with one’s feelings and thoughts about England during the crucial and early part of the last war. The position of the shield and its angle gives protection from above. The distance of the shield from the body and the rectangular shape of the space enclosed between the inside surface of the shield and the concave front of the body is important... This sculpture is the first single and separate male figure that I have done in sculpture and carrying it out in its final large scale was almost like the discovery of a new subject matter; the bony, edgy, tense forms were a great excitement to make... Like the bronze 'Draped Reclining Figure' of 1952-3 I think 'The Warrior' has some Greek influence, not consciously wished…”

“This cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we choose; it is a desire written in the human heart. We are that part of creation which seeks to understand all creation. We find the best among us, send them forth into unmapped darkness, and pray they will return. They go in peace for all mankind, and all mankind is in their debt.”

“Today, we are seeing hundreds of years of scientific discovery being challenged by people who simply disregard facts that don’t happen to agree with their agendas. Some call it "pseudo-science," others call it "faith-based science," but when you notice where this negligence tends to take place, you might as well call it "political science."”

“I think I’ve had three or four moments in my work over the last twenty-five years that have been real discoveries. The pigment pieces felt to me as if they were a discovery about an object and what an object can be; how an object can be and not be. Then, of course, the void pieces. The idea that if I empty out all the content and just make something that is an empty form, I don’t empty out the content at all. The content is there in a way that’s more surprising than if I tried to make a content. So, therefore, the idea that subject matter is somehow not the same as content. Then, in a different sort of way, moving from matte surfaces to shiny surfaces. In terms of the fact that the traditional sublime is the matte surface, deep and absorbing, and that the shiny might be a modern sublime, which is fully reflective, absolutely present, and returns the gaze. This feels like a new way to think about the non-objective object.”