Quotes about discovery (827 quotes, page 4)

“The art of creation lies in the gift of perceiving the particular and generalizing it, thus creating the particular again. It is therefore a powerful transforming force and a generator of creative solutions in relation to a given problem. It is the currency of human exchanges, which enables the sharing of states of the soul and conscience, and the discovery of new fields of experience.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Source: Katie Ahlquist concept http://sparkledesign.net/Concept.shtml, Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

Art , Soul , Problem

“I believe that shortly after LSD was discovered, it was recognized as being of great value to psychoanalysis and psychiatry. It was not considered to be an escape. It was a very important discovery at that time, and for fifteen years it could be used legally in psychiatric treatment and for scientific study in humans. During this time, Delysid, the name I gave to LSD, was used safely, and was the subject of thousands of publications in the professional literature. Actually, just last week, I had visitors from the Albert Hofmann Foundation, to whom I gave all of the original documentation, which had been stored at the Sandoz Laboratories. This early work was very well documented, and shows how well research with LSD went until it became part of the drug scene in the 1960s. So, from originally being part of the therapeutic pharmacopeia, LSD became a drug of the street and inevitably it was made illegal. Because of this reputation, it became unavailable to the medical field, and so the research, which had been very open, was stopped. Now it appears that this research may start again. The importance of such investigations appears to be recognized by the health authorities, and so it is my hope that finally the prohibition is coming to an end, and the medical field can return to the explorations which were forced to stop thirty years ago.”

Albert Hofmann (1906–2008) Swiss chemist

MAPS interview (1998)

Health , Hope , Literature , Study

“The Rigveda stated that the earth was a …globe suspended freely in space. The Vedic texts disclosed that the Sun held the earth and heavenly bodies in its orbit. The Shatapatha Brahmana, a treatise of untold antiquity, recognized and explained the fact that the earth was spherical.. Aryabhata explained the daily rising and setting of planets and stars in terms of the earth’s constant revolutionary motion. The Surya Siddhantha said that the earth, owing to its gravitational force draw all things to itself. In physics, the thinker Kanada, explained light and heat as different aspects of the same element, thus anticipating Clarke Maxwell's Electro-magnetic Theory, which unified different forms of radiant energy. Sankaracharya, in his Advaita thought expanded the concept of unity of matter and energy. Vacaspati recognized light as composed of minute particles emitted by substances, anticipating Newton’s Corpuscular Theory of Light and the later discovery of the Photon. In Botany, Sankara Mishra and Kanada have discussed the circulation of sap in the Plant and the Santiparva of Mahabharata has clearly stated that the plants develop on the strength of nutrients made through interaction of sunlight and materials obtained from the air and ground. Bhaskarcharya's concept of Differential Calculus preceded Newton by many centuries. His study of time identified Truti: The 3400th part of a second as the unit of time.”

Shankar Dayal Sharma (1918–1999) Indian politician

He has rightly brought out the rationality and application of Sanskrit literature in diverse fields
Source: Aruna Goel Good Governance and Ancient Sanskrit Literature http://books.google.co.in/books?id=El_VADF13pUC&pg=PA16, Deep and Deep Publications, 1 January 2003, p. 16-17

Star , Study , Light , Time

“We probed into the nature of space and time, and of the universal, both with regard to external nature and with regard to mind. But then, we went on to consider the general disorder and confusion that pervades the consciousness of mankind. It is here that I encountered what I feel to be Krishnamurti's major discovery. What he was seriously proposing is that all this disorder, which is the root cause of such widespread sorrow and misery, and which prevents human beings from properly working together, has its root in the fact that we are ignorant of the general nature of our own processes of thought. Or to put it differently it may be said that we do not see what is actually happening, when we are engaged in the activity of thinking.”

David Bohm (1917–1992) American theoretical physicist

"A Brief Introduction to the Work of Krishnamurti" http://www.krishnamurtiaustralia.org/articles/bohm_introduction.htm

Feeling , Nature , Thinking , Universe

“The ploughman ploughs, the fisherman dreams of fish;
Aloft, the sailor, through a world of ropes
Guides tangled meditations, feverish
With memories of girls forsaken, hopes
Of brief reunions, new discoveries,
Past rum consumed, rum promised, rum potential.”

Michael Hamburger (1924–2007) British translator, poet, critic, memoirist and academic

Lines On Brueghel's "Icarus" http://www.themediadrome.com/content/poetry/hamburger_lines_on_icarus.htm

World , Dreams , Hope , Girl

“Of the splendid constellation of great names… we admire the living and revere dead far too warmly and too deeply to suffer us sit in judgment on their respective claims to in this or that particular discovery; to balance mathematical skill of one against the experimental dexterity of another, or the philosophical acumen a third. So long as "one star differs from another in glory,"—so long as there shall exist varieties, or even incompatibilities of excellence,—so long will the admiration of mankind be found sufficient for all who merit it.”

John Herschel (1792–1871) English mathematician, astronomer, chemist and photographer

On the Theory of Light https://books.google.com/books?id=Lo4_AAAAcAAJ (1828) p.494

Star , Mathematics , Suffering , Dead

“Eudoxus was perhaps the greatest of all Archimedes's predecessors, and it is his achievements, especially the discovery of the method of exhaustion, which interest us in connexion with Archimedes.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

p, 125
Achimedes (1920)

“What is wonderful about a university like LSE is that you not only receive teaching of very high quality, you also learn where to find the knowledge you are seeking. And you make unexpected discoveries; it was a Marxist professor who introduced me to the work of Cardinal Newman, a great master of English prose as well as theology.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

Part 1, 1919 - 1968 The Road to 24 Sussex Drive, p. 46
Memoirs (1993)

Knowledge , Learning , Universe

“The historian's special contribution is the discovery of the manifold shapes of time. The aim of the historian, regardless of his specialty in erudition, is to portray time. He is committed to the detection and description of the shape of time.”

George Kubler (1912–1996) American art historian

Source: The Shape of Time, 1982, p. 12

Time

“Mathematics have a triple aim. They must furnish an instrument for the study of nature. But that is not all: they have a philosophic aim and, I dare maintain, an esthetic aim. They must aid the philosopher to fathom the notions of number, of space, of time. And above all, their adepts find therein delights analogous to those given by painting and music. They admire the delicate harmony of numbers and forms; they marvel when a new discovery opens to them an unexpected perspective; and has not the joy they thus feel the esthetic character, even though the senses take no part therein? Only a privileged few are called to enjoy it fully, it is true, but is not this the case for all the noblest arts?
This is why I do not hesitate to say that mathematics deserve to be cultivated for their own sake, and the theories inapplicable to physics as well as the others. Even if the physical aim and the esthetic aim were not united, we ought not to sacrifice either.”

Henri Poincaré book The Value of Science

Source: The Value of Science (1905), Ch. 5: Analysis and Physics

Art , Music , Feeling , Mathematics

“The experience or the vision is the artist’s counterpart to the scientific discovery of a principle or law. What the scientist does when he discovers a new law is to give a new ordering to observed facts. The artist is engaged in a similar task. He gives new meaning to our experience and organizes it in a different way due to his perception of subtler qualities in reality.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Law , Way , Reality

“Two currents of ideas are very prominent in modern thought and culture. On the one hand, there is an intense commitment to truthfulness--or, at any rate, a pervasive suspiciousness, a readiness against being fooled, an eagerness to see through appearances to the real structures and motives that lie behind them. Always familiar in politics, it stretches to historical understanding, to the social sciences, and even to interpretations of discoveries and research in the natural sciences.
Together with this demand for truthfulness, however, or (to put it less positively) this reflex against deceptiveness, there is an equally pervasive suspicion about truth itself: whether there is such a thing; if there is, whether it can be more than relative or subjective or something of that kind; altogether, whether we should bother about it, in carrying on our activities or in giving an account of them. These two things, the devotion to truthfulness and the suspicion directed to the idea of truth, are connected to one other. The desire for truthfulness drives a process of criticism which weakens the assurance that there is any secure or unqualifiedly stateable truth.”

Bernard Williams (1929–2003) English moral philosopher

Source: Truth and Truthfulness (2002), p. 1; Chapter 1: The problem

Truth , Lie , Fools , Motivation

“If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

The World of Mathematics (1956) Edited by J. R. Newman

Truth , Mathematics

“The single idea that resounds on every page of this book is the idea of the infinity of the human spirit, in the individual as well as in humanity. It is a view of the wonderful and terrible disproportion of that spirit to everything that would contain and diminish it, of its awakening to its own nature through its confrontation with the reality of constraint and the prospect of death, of its terror before the indifference and vastness of the nature around it, of its discovery that what it most shares with the whole of the universe is its ruination by time, of its subsequent recognition that time is the core of reality if anything is, of its enslavement to orders of society and culture that belittle it, of its need to create a world, a human world, in which it can be and become itself even if to do so it must nevertheless rebel against every dogma, every custom, and every empire, and of its power to realize this seemingly impossible and paradoxical program by identifying, in each intellectual and political situation, the next steps.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 26-7

Death , Books , World , Idea

“As quoted in "Rumi and Self-Discovery" by Ibrahim Gamard, in Islamica Magazine Issue 15,”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

Summer 2005

Quotes , Summer

“I have always thought that clarity is a form of courtesy that the philosopher owes; moreover, this discipline of ours considers it more truly a matter of honor today than ever before to be open to all minds … This is different from the individual sciences which increasingly [interpose] between the treasure of their discoveries and the curiosity of the profane the tremendous dragon of their closed terminology.”

José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist

Source: What is Philosophy? (1964), p. 19

Science

“I don’t write stories to tell readers what to think, or even tell them what I think; I write stories to show me what I think. Writing is always a journey of discovery that way, as suspenseful for me as I hope it will be for the audience.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

Geek Speak Magazine Interview (2010)

Hope , Way , Thinking

“And finally we have this, this discovery that Earth's magnetic field can be ripped open and our atmosphere laid bare to the solar wind, much like Mars. Magnetism is underrated in the grand scheme of things, in my opinion. We'd do well to pay more attention to magnetic trends in our corner of the universe and what effects it has on Earthly climate.”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

Earth's Magnetic Field Has Massive Breach – scientists baffled http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/16/earths-magnetic-field-has-massive-breach-scientists-baffled/, wattsupwiththat.com, December 16, 2008.
2008

Universe

“One of the most profound and universal realizations of later childhood, a realization that probably is never totally integrated, is the discovery that one's parents are not necessarily representative of the human species, that one has grown up in an idiosyncratically structured family with its own peculiarities and dramas.”

Stephen Mitchell (1946–2000) American psychologist

Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 275

Family , Parent , Universe , Childhood

“A single data point—even a single clutch of measurements—could not usually prove or disprove anything, but it might later turn out to play a vital role in a chain of argument, even if it was only in the biasing of some statistical distribution closer to one hypothesis than another. Science, as Naqi had long since realised, was as much a swarming, social process as it was something driven by ecstatic moments of personal discovery.
It was something she was proud to be part of.”

Alastair Reynolds book Diamond Dogs

Turquoise Days, Chapter 1 (p. 188)
Short fiction, Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days (2003)

Science , Parting , Personality

“If it is the drive of our time, after freedom of thought is won, to pursue it to that perfection through which it changes to freedom of the will in order to realize the latter as the principle of a new era, then the final goal of education can no longer be knowledge, but the will born out of knowledge, and the spoken expression of that for which it has to strive is: the personal or free man. Truth consists in nothing other than man's revelation of himself, and thereto belongs the discovery of himself, the liberation from all that is alien, the uttermost abstraction or release from all authority, the re-won naturalness. Such thoroughly true men are not supplied by school; if they are there, they are there in spite of school.”

Max Stirner book The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 21

Men , Truth , Education , School

“A good means to discovery is to take away certain parts of a system to find out how the rest behaves.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) edited by Alan Lindsay Mackay, p. 154

Parting

“But if men either knew themselves thoroughly, or had the slightest knowledge of God, they would never claim as their own a divine and immortal nature; nor would they think themselves something great because they have made for themselves gridirons, basins, and bowls, because they have made under-shirts, outer-shirts, cloaks, plaids, robes of state, knives, cuirasses and swords, mattocks, hatchets, ploughs. Never, I say, carried away by pride and arrogance, would they believe themselves to be deities of the first rank, and fellows of the highest in his exaltation, because they had devised the arts of grammar, music, oratory, and geometry. For we do not see what is so wonderful in these arts, that because of their discovery the soul should be believed to be above the sun as well as all the stars, to surpass both in grandeur and essence the whole universe, of which these are parts.”

Arnobius (255–327) Christian apologist

Book II, § 19
Adversus Nationes

Men , God , Art , Music

“Racism originated not in ignorance and fear but as part of an enlightened enterprise of intellectual discovery.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Source: Books, The End of Racism (1995), Ch. 1

Fear , Parting

“There is no merit in being truthful when one is truthful by nature, or rather when one can be nothing else; it is a gift, like poetry or music. But it needs courage to be truthful after carefully considering the matter, unless a kind of pride is involved; for example, the man who says to himself, "I am ugly," and then says, "I am ugly" to his friends, lest they should think themselves the first to make the discovery.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote, 6 June 1824 (p. 45)
1815 - 1830, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1822 – 1824)

Truth , Music , Courage , Nature

“Above all, it's creative thinking that lies at the basis of discoveries. You must dare to think differently, see things from different sides, in order to come across fortuitous new ideas frequently. You should develop even the most stupid ideas and when you do this systematically, there will always come something useful out of it.”

Simon van der Meer (1925–2011) Dutch physicist

in De Libero van het CERN. Jaarboek 1985. Vereniging voor Technische Physica. TU Delft. p. 61.

Stupidity , Idea , Thinking

“Matthew's response: To me the conception of this law of Nature came intuitively as a self-evident fact, almost without an effort of concentrated thought. Mr Darwin here seems to have more merit in the discovery than I have had; to me it did not appear a discovery. He seems to have worked it out by inductive reason, slowly and with due caution to have made his way synthetically from fact to fact onwards; while with me it was by a general glance at the scheme of Nature that I estimated this select production of species as an a priori recognisable fact – an axiom requiring only to be pointed out to be admitted by unprejudiced minds of sufficient grasp.”

Patrick Matthew (1790–1874) British scientist

Gardeners' Chronicle

Law , Way , Nature , Effort

“I shall often discuss mathematical discoveries… I shall try to make up a likely story how the discovery could have happened. I shall try to emphasize the motives underlying the discovery, the plausible inferences that led to it… everything that deserves imitation.”

George Pólya (1887–1985) Hungarian mathematician

Induction and Analogy in Mathematics (1954)

Mathematics , Motivation

“The most sensational surprise was the sudden discovery, one day, that my pictures, for the first time in history, had become walls. By means of what strange process had I arrived at such precise images? And why did they make me, their first viewer, quake with emotion?”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

1945 - 1970, A Report on the Wall' 1970

History , Time

“To leave behind Earth and air and gravity is an ancient dream of humanity. For these seven, it was a dream fulfilled. Each of these astronauts had the daring and discipline required of their calling. Each of them knew that great endeavors are inseparable from great risks. And each of them accepted those risks willingly, even joyfully, in the cause of discovery.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2003, Columbia space shuttle disaster (February 2003)

Dreams

“The discovery of orgone energy was made through consistent, thorough study of energy functions, first in the realm of the psyche, and later in the realm of biological functioning.”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst

Ether, God and Devil (1949)

Study

“One of the most startling discoveries of my career was when I realized that the strongest women in the world are not lesbians but heterosexual women, who know how to handle men.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 80

Women , Men , World

“Reflexion is careful and laborious thought, and watchful attention directed to the agreeable effect of one's plan. Invention, on the other hand, is the solving of intricate problems and the discovery of new principles by means of brilliancy and versatility.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter II, Sec. 2

Problem

“Heroes are important not only because they symbolize what we believe to be important, but because they also convey universal truths about personal self-discovery and self-transcendence, one’s role in society, and the relation between the two.”

Alan Hirsch (1959) South African missionary

Source: The Faith of Leap (2011), p. 106

Truth , Universe , Personality

“I know not what discoveries, what inventions, what thoughts may leap from the brain of the world. I know not what garments of glory may be woven by the years to come. I cannot dream of the victories to be won upon the fields of thought; but I do know, that coming from the infinite sea of the future, there will never touch this "bank and shoal of time" a richer gift, a rarer blessing than liberty for man, for woman, and for child.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child (1877)

World , Dreams , Time , Future

“In 1454 he [Prince Henry the Navigator] received from the Pope Nicholas V the right to all discoveries up to India. The Bull, which is of fundamental importance and is the first of three which determines the Portuguese monopoly in the East, is quoted below:…‘We, after careful deliberation, and having considered that we have by our, apostolic letters conceded to King Affonso, the right, total and absolute, to invade, conquer and subject all the countries which are under rule of the enemies of Christ, Saracen or Pagan, by our apostolic letter we wish the same King Affonso, the Prince, and all their successors, occupy and possess in exclusive rights the said islands, ports and seas undermentioned, and all faithful Christians are prohibited without the permission of the said Affonso and his successors to encroach on their sovereignty. Of the conquests already made, or to be made, all the conquests which extend to Cape Bajador and Cape Non to the coast of Guinea and all the Orient is perpetually and for the future the sovereignty of King Affonso.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

Faith , Quotes , Future , Christ

“What has occurred over the course of the last few centuries is a growing (but by no means universal or certain) recognition that science gets the job done, while religion makes excuses. Sometimes they are very pretty excuses that capture the imagination of the public, but ultimately, when you want to win a war or heal a dying child or get rich from a discovery or explore Antarctica, you turn to science and reason, or you fail.”

PZ Myers (1957) American scientist and associate professor of biology

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/09/12/saving-gods-by-making-them-eve/
Saving gods by making them even emptier of meaning
Pharyngula
2009-09-12

War , Religion , Imagination , Universe

“Man was formed with an understanding for the obtainment of knowledge; and happy is he who is employed in the pursuit of it. Ignorance is in its nature unprofitable; but every kind of knowledge may be turned to use. Diligence is generally rewarded with the discovery of that which it seeks after; sometimes of that which is more valuable.”

George Horne (1730–1792) English churchman, writer and university administrator

Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay, 1880

Understanding , Nature , Knowledge , Happiness

“Differences in reaction to toxic substances vary considerably between species so that the value of these tests remains doubtful. Although thalidomide was extensively tested on animals in several countries, its terrible properties were not discovered. Conversely, penicillin, the greatest medical discovery of the century, was not extensively tested on animals before its miraculous therapeutic qualities were demonstrated in human patients. If it had been fully tested on animals its high toxicity for guinea pigs would have almost certainly prevented its clinical use.”

Richard D. Ryder (1940) British psychologist

Experiments on Animals (1971)

Animals , Country

“I would teach the world how the Greeks proved, more than 2,000 years ago, that there are infinitely many prime numbers. In my mind, this discovery is the beginning of mathematics – when humankind realised that, by pure thought alone, it could prove eternal truths of the universe.
Prime numbers are the indivisible numbers, numbers that can be divided only by themselves and one. They are the most important numbers in mathematics, because every number is built by multiplying prime numbers together – for example, 60 = 2 x 2 x 3 x 5. They are like the atoms of arithmetic, the hydrogen and oxygen of the world of numbers.”

Marcus du Sautoy (1965) British professor of mathematics

In "Life lessons" http://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/apr/07/science.highereducation?fb_ref=desktop The Guardian (7 April 2005)

Truth , World , Mathematics , Universe

“My own beliefs are that the road to a scientific discovery is seldom direct, and that it does not necessarily require great expertise. In fact, I am convinced that often a newcomer to a field has a great advantage because he is ignorant and does not know all the complicated reasons why a particular experiment should not be attempted.”

Ivar Giaever (1929) Norwegian physicist

Nobel lecture (1973)

“In concluding these papers, I hope I may be permitted to offer a few words in favour of anatomy, as better adapted for discovery than experiment. … Experiments have never been the means of discovery; and a survey of what has been attempted of late years in physiology, will prove that the opening of living animals has done more to perpetuate error, than to confirm the just views taken from the study of anatomy and natural motions.”

Charles Bell (1774–1842) Scottish surgeon and artist (1774-1842)

An Exposition of the Natural System of the Nerves of the Human Body. With a Republication of the Papers Delivered to the Royal Society, on the Subject of the Nerves, London: Spottiswoode, 1824, pp. 376 https://books.google.it/books?id=hc0GAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA376-377.

Hope , Error , Nature , Study

“Fearing discovery of their “fraudulence,” they burden themselves with too much work to compensate for their lack of self-esteem and identity. Work/life balance is a meaningless concept to them.”

Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries (1942) Dutch academic

The Dangers of Feeling Like a Fake, 2005

Life , Fear

“Therefore, general systems theory should be, methodologically, an important means of controlling and instigating the transfer of principles from one field to another, and it will no longer be necessary to duplicate or triplicate the discovery of the same principles in different fields isolated from the other.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory, p. 80

“Actually Rogers Fry's Vision and Design [1920] was the most lucky discovery for me. I came on it by chance while looking for another book in the Leeds Reference Library. Fry in his essay on 'Negro Sculpture' stressed the 'three-dimensional realization' that characterized African art and its 'truth to material'. More, Fry opened the way to other books and to the realization of the British museum. That was really the beginning.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote of Moore in 'Partisan Review', New York, March-April 1947
1940 - 1955

Truth , Books , Art , Way

“Men of science in former ages worked in secret, and instead of publishing their discoveries, taught them in secret to carefully selected pupils.”

Alfred Percy Sinnett book The Occult World

The Occult World, Introduction (1881)

Men , Secret , Age , Science

“…As time passed I began to play a game with water's secret powers; I surrendered my so-called free consciousness and allowed the water to take possession of it for a while. Little by little this game turned into a profoundly earnest endeavour, because I realised that one could detach one's own consciousness from the body and attach it to that of the water. When my own consciousness was eventually returned to me, then the water's most deeply concealed psyche often revealed the most extraordinary things to me. As a result of this investigation, a researcher was born who could dispatch his consciousness on a voyage of discovery, as it were. In this way I was able to experience things that had escaped other people's notice, because they were unaware that a human being is able to send forth his free consciousness into those places the eyes cannot see. By practising this blindfolded vision, I eventually developed a bond with mysterious Nature, whose essential being I then slowly learnt to perceive and understand…”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Callum Coats: Living Energies - Viktor Schauberger's brilliant work with Natural Energies Explained (2002)

People , Secret , Way , Game

“I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the results of this evening's experiments – astonished at the wonderful power you have developed, and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever! … I think it is the most wonderful thing that I have ever experienced, and I congratulate you with all my heart on this wonderful discovery.”

Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) English composer of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

A message on a phonograph cylinder, recorded by Arthur Sullivan at a demonstration of Thomas Edison's phonograph in London on 5 October 1888; cited from Michael Chanan Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music (London: Verso, 1995) p. 26. See also "Historic Sullivan Recordings" http://diamond.boisestate.edu/gas/sullivan/html/historic.html at the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive; and Very Early Recorded Sound http://www.nps.gov/edis/photosmultimedia/very-early-recorded-sound.htm at the National Historical Park website. The recording was issued on CD by the British Library (Voices of History 2: NSACD 19-20, 2005).

Music , Thinking , Heart

“Heisenberg finds that facts of observation lead uniquely and inevitably to the theoretical structure known as matrix mechanics. This shows that the total radiation in any region of empty space can change only by a single complete quantum at a time. Thus not only in the photo-electric phenomenon, but in all other transfers of energy through space, energy is always transferred by complete quanta; fractions of a quantum can never occur. This brings atomicity into our picture of radiation just as definitely as the discovery of the electron and its standard charge brought atomicity into our picture of matter and of electricity.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Photo , Change , Time

“When one is involved in the discovery and discernment of the marvelous law and symmetries that shape the phenomenal world, one cannot but be struck by the silent and unfathomable intelligence that seems to pervade the Cosmos.”

Varadaraja V. Raman (1932) American physicist

page 142
Truth and Tension in Science and Religion

World , Law , Intelligence

“The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one's own potentialities.”

Colin Wilson book The Outsider

Source: The Outsider (1956), p. 231

World

“Gradually I became aware [c. 1914-1918] that Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries; it was not developing abstraction towards its ultimate goal: the expression of pure reality.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

1930's

Reality

“So long as an individual, whether person or state, has only his own arms to depend upon in order to defend his rights by arms, then he must be stronger than anyone likely to challenge those rights. Which means that that other is deprived of similar defense. Within the frontiers man long ago made the discovery that the only way out of that dilemma is for the community, by putting its combined power behind a protective law, to assume the defense of the individual. Defense must be a communal, a collective function, or it cannot exist effectively at all.”

Norman Angell (1872–1967) British politician

Peace and the Public Mind (1935)

Law , Way , Communication , Dependency

“Of all the discoveries which men need to make, the most important, at the present moment, is that of the self-forming power treasured up in themselves. They little suspect its extent, as little as the savage apprehends the energy which the mind is created to exert on the material world.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

Men , World

“The key point today is to establish the universal validity of individual mythology... The artistic moment is therefore that in which the discovery of pre-conscious universal myths comes about, and in the reduction of these into the form of images. It is clear that if the artist is to be able to bring to light zones of myth that are authentic and virginal he must have both an extreme degree of self-awareness and the gifts of iron precision and logic.”

Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) Italian artist

Source: For the Discovery of a Zone of Images', Piero Manzoni, 1957, pp. 16-17

Light , Universe

“It is not true, out of geometry, that the mathematical sciences are, in all their parts those models of finished accuracy which many suppose. The extreme boundaries of analysis have always been as imperfectly understood as the tract beyond the boundaries was absolutely unknown. But the way to enlarge the settled country has not been by keeping within it, but by making voyages of discovery, and I am perfectly convinced that the student should be exercised in this manner; that is, that he should be taught how to examine the boundary, as well as how to cultivate the interior. …allowing all students whose capacity will let them read on the higher branches of applied mathematics, to have each his chance of being led to the cultivation of those parts of analysis on which rather depends its future progress than its present use in the sciences of matter.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

The Differential and Integral Calculus (1836)

Way , Exercises , Mathematics , Science

“When I look up at the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is that I really see there, I am constrained to say, "There is no God." The mind staggers in its attempt to grasp the idea of a being that could do that. It is futile to attempt it. It is not the works of some God that I see there. I am face to face with a power that baffles speech. I see no lineaments of personality, no human traits, but an energy upon whose currents solar systems are but bubbles. In the presence of it man and the race of man are less than motes in the air. I doubt if any mind can expand its conception of God sufficiently to meet the astounding disclosures of modern science. It is easier to say there is no God. The universe is so unhuman, that is, it goes its way with so little thought of man. He is but an incident, not an end. We must adjust our notions to the discovery that things are not shaped to him, but that he is shaped to them. The air was not made for his lungs, but he has lungs because there is air; the light was not created for his eye, but he has eyes because there is light. All the forces of nature are going their own way; man avails himself of them, or catches a ride as best he can. If he keeps his seat he prospers; if he misses his hold and falls he is crushed.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. XII: God and Nature

God , Way , Idea , Nature

“Acting has been a journey of self-discovery for me. It is the most fulfilling thing I know. It is also terrifying, and painfully awkward. But for me there is no better feeling that truthfully living in a moment, under completely imaginative circumstances. There is also nothing more devastating than walking out of an audition knowing that you were “acting” and not simply being. I feel like a fraud most of the time, but then you have these magical moments when you really feel and it is those moments that make it all worthwhile. It’s a high like nothing I have ever experienced. Acting is the most paradoxical of crafts – you have to learn it, practice obsessively and then throw it all away. Its like walking on a tightrope, there is a very thin line between passion and technique and you have to find the perfect balance. I think it’s a very personal and private art.”

Sara Malakul Lane (1983) Thai-American actress and model

Sara Malakul Lane – Getting to Know http://somethingyousaid.com/2013/08/07/getting-to-know-sara-malakul-lane-2/ (August 7, 2013)

Art , Feeling , Imagination , Fraud

“Things evolve to evolve. Evolutionary processes are the linchpin of change. These processes of discovery represent a complexity of simple systems that flux in perpetual tension as they teeter at the edge of chaos. This whirlwind of emergence is responsible for the spontaneous order and higher, organized complexity so noticeable in biological evolution—one–celled critters beefing up to become multicellular organisms.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 335

Change

“If we can advance any propositions that are both true and new, these are indisputably our own, by right of discovery; and if we can repeat what is old more briefly and brightly than others, this also becomes our own, by right of conquest.”

Charles Caleb Colton (1777–1832) British priest and writer

Preface
Lacon (1820)

“We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experience, because he himself re-creates them.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

Part 1: "The Creative Mind", §9 ( p. 20 http://books.google.com/books?id=TeHXAAAAMAAJ&q=%22We+re-make+nature+by+the+act+of+discovery+in+the+poem+or+in+the+theorem+And+the+great+poem+and+the+deep+theorem+are+new+to+every+reader+and+yet+are+his+own+experience+because+he+himself+re-creates+them%22&pg=PA20#v=onepage)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)

Nature

“The communication of modern science to the ordinary citizen, necessary, important, desirable as it is, cannot be considered an easy task. The prime obstacle is lack of education. … There is also the difficulty of making scientific discoveries interesting and exciting without completely degrading them intellectually. … It is a weakness of modern science that the scientist shrinks from this sort of publicity, and thus gives an impression of arrogant mystagoguery.”

John Ziman (1925–2005) New Zealand physicist

[John M. Ziman, The Force of Knowledge: The Scientific Dimension of Society, Cambridge University Press, 1976, 0-521-09917-X, 119]

Education , Communication , Science

“If my history lesson has done nothing else, it should have reminded you that, during any given period in the evolving history of physics, the prevailing, main line, climate of opinion was likely as not to be wrong, as seen in the light of later developments. And yet, in those earlier times, with relatively few individuals involved, change did occur, but slowly… What is fundamentally different in the present day situation in high energy physics is that large numbers of workers are involved, with corresponding pressures to conformity and resistance to any deflection in direction of the main stream, and that the time scale of one scientific generation is much too long for the rapid pace of experimental discovery. I also have a secret fear that new generations may not necessarily have the opportunity to become familiar with dissident ideas.”

Julian Schwinger (1918–1994) American theoretical physicist

as quoted by Sameer Shah in "If you can't join 'em, beat 'em": Julian Schwinger's Conflicts in Physics. Directions in Cultural History, The UCLA Historical Journal, Volume 21, 2005-2006, p. 50

Secret , Fear , History , Idea

“When you're as hollow as Enoch Kane, the emptiness aches. He's desperate to fill it, but he doesn't have the patience or the commitment to fill it with anything worthwhile… So a man like Kane obsesses on one thing after another — sex, money, food, power, drugs, alcohol — anything that seems to give meaning to his days, but that requires no real self-discovery or self-sacrifice.”

Dean Koontz book From the Corner of His Eye

Source: From the Corner of His Eye (2000), Chapter 64; words of former policeman Thomas Vanadium

Money , Alcohol , Food , Sex

“What is it that is done to our children that their puberty should deform them? They have the joy of movement; they have an enterprising curiosity; they are ready for sensible self-denial; they dream ahead, and they have a faithful memory, and, above all, great compassion. […] The well-meaning educator who flatters and humours the young not only does a disservice to the community, but also damages the individual by depriving him of the opportunities of self-discovery.”

Kurt Hahn (1886–1974) German educator

Quoted by Donald McLachlan in Kurt Hahn: A Life Span in Education and Politics, ed. Herman Röhrs, 1966, tr. 1970, ISBN 0710068859, §1, p. 8.

Children , Education , Faith , Dreams

“For catholicity doesn't mean a unity of perspective from which we start, but the discovery and construction of a real and surprising fraternity which begins with overcoming the tendency to forge from our own perspective a sacred which excludes.”

James Alison (1959) Christian theologian, priest

Source: Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001), " Theology amidst the stones and dust http://girardianlectionary.net/res/alison_elijah.htm", p. 36.

“I think the discovery of nonlocality is touching in on the whole. So that these these seemingly separate events are somehow connected through the whole. … you have this larger enveloping field and we're, you know, just beginning to understand something about that… so I love that discovery although I don't think we're anywhere near really knowing what we've come upon.”

Brian Swimme (1950) American cosmologist

Meaningoflife.tv interview, 2013

Love , Understanding , Thinking

“If we are to be morally and ethically responsible, there can be no turning back once we find, as we have found, that some of the most basic presuppositions of these values are mistaken. Playing God is indeed playing with fire. But that is what we mortals have done since Prometheus, the patron saint of dangerous discoveries. We play with fire and take the consequences, because the alternative is cowardice in the face of the unknown.”

Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013) American legal philosopher

Sovereign Virtue (2000), p. 446

God

“I am one of what must be an increasing number who find the portentous moralisings of A. Solzhenitsyn a bore and an irritation. Scarcely any aspect of life in the countries where he passes his voluntary exile has failed to incur his pessimistic censure. Coming from Russia, where freedom of the press has been not so much unknown as uncomprehended since long before the Revolution, he is shocked to discover that a free press disseminated all kinds of false, partial and invented information and that journalists contradict themselves from one day to the next without shame and without apology. Only a Russian would find all that surprising, or fail to understand that freedom which is not misused is not freedom at all.

Like all travellers he misunderstands what he observes. It simply is not true that ‘within the Western countries the press has become more powerful than the legislative power, the executive and the judiciary’. The British electorate regularly disprove this by electing governments in the teeth of the hostility and misrepresentation of virtually the whole of the press. Our modern Munchhausen has, however, found a more remarkable mare’s nest still: he has discovered the ‘false slogan, characteristic of a false era, that everyone is entitled to know everything’. Excited by this discovery he announces a novel and profound moral principle, a new addendum to the catalogue of human rights. ‘People,’ he says, ‘have a right not to know, and it is a more valuable one.’ Not merely morality but theology illuminates the theme: people have, say Solzhenitsyn, ‘the right not to have their divine souls’ burdened with ‘the excessive flow of information’.

Just so. Whatever may be the case in Russia, we in the degenerate West can switch off the radio or television, or not buy a newspaper, or not read such parts of it as we do not wish to. I can assure Solzhenitsyn that the method works admirably, ‘right’ or ‘no right’. I know, because I have applied it with complete success to his own speeches and writings.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Letter in answer to Solzhenitsyn's Harvard statement (21 June 1978), from Reflections of a Statesman. The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell (London: Bellew, 1991), p. 577
1970s

Life , Hostility , People , Travel

“As is known, scientific physics dates its existence from the discovery of the differential calculus. Only when it was learned how to follow continuously the course of natural events, attempts, to construct by means of abstract conceptions the connection between phenomena, met with success. To do this two things are necessary: First, simple fundamental concepts with which to construct; second, some method by which to deduce, from the simple fundamental laws of the construction which relate to instants of time and points in space, laws for finite intervals and distances, which alone are accessible to observation”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

can be compared with experience
Die partiellen Differentialgleichungen der mathematischen Physik (1882) as quoted by Robert Édouard Moritz, Memorabilia Mathematica; Or, The Philomath's Quotation-book https://books.google.com/books?id=G0wtAAAAYAAJ (1914) p. 239

Law , Nature , Learning , Time

“Simultaneous discovery is utterly commonplace, and it was only the rarity of scientists, not the inherent improbability of the phenomenon, that made it remarkable in the past. Scientists on the same road may be expected to arrive at the same destination, often not far apart.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

Peter Medawar, "The Act of Creation" (New Statesman, 19 June 1964)
1960s

Past

“After making public the gruesome discoveries made at the wasteland near Minsk, dozens of reports appeared in the press about similar mass graves uncovered in all regional centres of the Republic and many lesser towns. Who lies in these graves, who were the people shot in all those years, and - most importantly - who were the murderers? We have no answer yet to these questions, and one gets an impression that there are powerful forces not interested at all in such answers ever being given.”

Vasil Bykaŭ (1924–2003) Belarusian writer

'Zhazhda peremen' ['Thirst for Change'], Pravda, 24 November 1989, p.4. Source: [Modernity and Ambivalence, Zygmunt Bauman, 68, 2013, John Wiley & Sons, 9780745638119]

People , Question , Appearance

“The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

As quoted in The Guardian (3 June 1988)

Light , Time

“Today we know that on the sub-atomic level the fate of an electron or a whole atom is not determined by its past. But this discovery has not led to any basically new departure in the philosophy of nature, only to a state of bewildered embarrassment, a further retreat of physics into a language of even more abstract symbolism. Yet if causality has broken down and events are not rigidly governed by the pushes and pressures of the past, may they not be influenced in some manner by the "pull" of the future—which is a manner of saying that "purpose" may be a concrete physical factor in the evolution of the universe, both on the organic and unorganic levels. In the relativistic cosmos, gravitation is a result of the curvature and creases in space which continually tend to straighten themselves out—which, as Whittaker remarked, "is a statement so completely teleological that it certainly would have delighted the hearts of the schoolmen."”

Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) Hungarian-British author and journalist

Epilogue [footnote referenced E.T. Whittaker's Space and Spirit (1946)]
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)

Fate , Departure , Nature , Universe

“The short step then required to complete the stride consists in recognition of the fact that a contre-relief is an architectonic structure, but the slightest deviation from the plumb-line of economy leads into a blind alley. The same fate must also overtake the architecture of cubist contre-relief... By taking these elements FROM THEM for itself it wants to become equally entitled to take its place alongside them as a new creation. The reference is to the narrow technical discoveries for example the submarine, the aeroplane, the motors and dynamos of every kind of motive power in each part of a battle-ship. Contre-relief is instinctively aware of their legitimate origin their economy of form and their realism of treatment.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1915 - 1925, Suprematism' in World Reconstruction (1920)

Fate , Motivation , Parting

“Mrs Prentice: My uterine contractions have been bogus for some time!
Prentice: What a discovery! Married to the mistress of the fraudulent climax.”

Joe Orton (1933–1967) English playwright and author

What the Butler Saw (1969), Act I

Time

“The history of Alexandrian mathematics begins with the Elements of Euclid and closes with the Algebra of Diophantus, both of which are founded on the discoveries of several preceding centuries.”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

Preface
A Short History of Greek Mathematics (1884)

History , Mathematics

“If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run — and often in the short one — the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

The Exploration of Space (1951), p. 111
1950s

History , Learning

“Jacques Monod… published a paper entitled "Genetic Regulatory Mechanisms in the Synthesis of Protein." Using bacteria as a model system, they made the remarkable discovery that genes can be regulated—that is, they can be switched on and off like a water faucet.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

Water

“Spacecraft sent to Mars, Saturn, Mercury, the moon, comets, and asteroids have been making incredible discoveries, with more to come from recent launches to Jupiter, the moon, and Mars. The country needs more of these robotic space exploration missions, not less.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[NewsBank, Tom Beal, Space research here faces a horizon of closures, cuts, The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson, Arizona, February 15, 2012]

Country

“Starting from Einstein's theory of general relativity, Oppenheimer and Snyder found solutions… that described what happens to a massive star when it has exhausted its supplies of nuclear energy. The star collapses gravitationally and disappears from the visible universe, leaving behind only an intense gravitational field to mark its presence. The star remains in a state of permanent free fall, collapsing endlessly inward into the gravitational pit without ever reaching the bottom. … In my opinion, the black hole is incomparably the most exciting and the most important consequence of general relativity. But Einstein … was actively hostile to the idea of black holes. … Oddly enough, Oppenheimer too in later life was uninterested in black holes, although… they were his most important contribution to science. … Oppenheimer in his later years believed that the only problem worthy of attention of a serious theoretical physicist was the discovery of fundamental equations of physics. Einstein certainly felt the same way.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Life , Hostility , Way , Star

“In return for this great gift that I could not repay in a thousand lifetimes, at least I can promise that, although I have frequently advanced wrong, or even stupid, arguments (in the light of later discoveries), at least I have never been lazy, and have never betrayed your trust by cutting corners or relying on superficial secondary sources. I have always based these essays upon original works in their original languages (with only two exceptions, when Fracastoro's elegant Latin verse and Beringer's foppish Latin pseudocomplexities eluded my imperfect knowledge of this previously universal scientific tongue).”

Stephen Jay Gould book I Have Landed

Preface, p. 6
I Have Landed (2002)

Stupidity , Knowledge , Light , Universe

“In the original discovery of a proposition of practical utility, by deduction from general principles and from experimental data, a complex algebraical investigation is often not merely useful, but indispensable; but in expounding such a proposition as a part of practical science, and applying it to practical purposes, simplicity is of the importance:—and… the more thoroughly a scientific man has studied higher mathematics, the more fully does he become aware of this truth—and… the better qualified does he become to free the exposition and application of principles from mathematical intricacy.”

William John Macquorn Rankine (1820–1872) civil engineer

p, 125
"On the Harmony of Theory and Practice in Mechanics" (Jan. 3, 1856)

Truth , Mathematics , Study , Science

“Treating a person as though he were generally rather than specifically deviant produces a self-fulfilling prophecy. It sets in motion several mechanisms which conspire to shape the person in the image people have of him. It the first place, one tends to be cut off, after being identified as deviant, from participation in more conventional groups, even though the specific consequences of the particular deviant activity might never of themselves have caused the isolation had there not also been the public knowledge and reaction to it. For example, being a homosexual may not affect one’s ability to do office work, but to be known as a homosexual in an office may make it impossible to continue working there. Similarly, though the effects of opiate drugs may not impair one’s working ability, to be known as an addict will probably lead to losing one’s job… The homosexual who is deprived of a “respectable” job by the discovery of his deviance may drift into unconventional, marginal occupations where it does not make so much difference. The drug addict finds himself forced into other illegitimate kinds of activity, such as robbery and theft, by the refusal of respectable employers to have him around.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), p. 34.

People , Knowledge , Personality

“This morning I received a letter from de Bellio. He writes that he does not believe scientific research into the nature of color and light can help the artist, neither can anatomy nor the laws of optics. He wants to discuss these questions with me and find out my views. Now everything depends on how this knowledge is to be used. But surely it is clear that we could not pursue our studies of light with much assurance if we did not have as a guide the discoveries of Chevreul and other scientists. I would not have distinguished between local color and light if science had not given us the hint; the same holds true for complementary colors, contrasting colors, etc. 'Yes', he will tell me: 'but these have always been taken into account, look at Monet' It is at this point that the question becomes serious!”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Camille Pissarro, in a letter, Eragny, 23 February 1887, to his son Lucien; in Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 99
1880's

Law , Color , Question , Nature

“I don't like honors. … I've already got the prize: the prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it. Those are the real things.”

Richard Feynman book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Source: No Ordinary Genius (1994), p. 82, from interview in "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" (1981): video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEwUwWh5Xs4&t=24m55s

People , Pleasure

“The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a discovery machine. We are actually looking to make discoveries. So, I think that’s the name of the game. As the data come in, the emphasis will be on the high statistical significance of the statements that we make at the end of the programme – we are half way through the LHC programme today and so [there is] another 10-15 years to go. The name of the game is actually to retrieve all the physics that is at this special energy scale of the LHC. There is some magic, I think, about this energy scale.”

Tejinder Virdee (1952) British physicist

"Discovery machine; Interview with Dr. Jim Virdee," 2010

Way , Game , Thinking

“The skein of human continuity must often become this tenuous across the centuries (hanging by a thread, in the old cliché), but the circle remains unbroken if I can touch the ink of Lavoisier's own name, written by his own hand. A candle of light, nurtured by the oxygen of his greatest discovery, never burns out if we cherish the intellectual heritage of such unfractured filiation across the ages. We may also wish to contemplate the genuine physical thread of nucleic acid that ties each of us to the common bacterial ancestor of all living creatures, born on Lavoisier's ancienne terre more than 3.5 billion years ago—and never since disrupted, not for one moment, not for one generation. Such a legacy must be worth preserving from all the guillotines of our folly.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Lying Stones of Marrakech

"The Proof of Lavoisier's Plates", p. 114
The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)

Age , Light

“Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves. It creates an explosion that for the moment frees us from handed-down frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and information and undigested theories and techniques of other people's findings. Spontaneity is the moment of personal freedom when we are faced with reality, and see it, explore it and act accordingly. In this reality the bits and pieces of ourselves function as an organic whole. It is the time of discovery, of experiencing, of creative expression.”

Viola Spolin (1906–1994) American academic and acting theorist

Improvisation for the Theater 1963), page 4

People , Reality , Freedom , Memory

“These Thoughts, my dear Friend, are many of them crude and hasty, and if I were merely ambitious of acquiring some Reputation in Philosophy, I ought to keep them by me, ’till corrected and improved by Time and farther Experience. But since even short Hints, and imperfect Experiments in any new Branch of Science, being communicated, have oftentimes a good Effect, in exciting the attention of the Ingenious to the Subject, and so becoming the Occasion of more exact disquisitions (as I before observed) and more compleat Discoveries, you are at Liberty to communicate this Paper to whom you please; it being of more Importance that Knowledge should increase, than that your Friend should be thought an accurate Philosopher.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Letter from Benjamin Franklin to Peter Collinson, September 1753.
1750s

Communication , Knowledge , Science , Time

“In the emerging picture of mankind in the universe, the future (if it exists) will surely entail discoveries about space and time which will open up whole new perspectives in the relationship between mankind, mind, and the uni-verse.… But what is now? There is no such thing in physics; it is not even clear that ‘now’ could ever be described, let alone explained, in terms of physics.… Notions such as ‘the past,’ ‘the present’ and ‘the future’ seem to be more linguistic than physical.… There is no universal now, but only a personal one—a ‘here and now.’ This strongly suggests that we look to the mind, rather than to the physical world, as the origin of the division of time into past, present, and future.…There is none of this in physics.… No physical experiment has ever been performed to detect the passage of time. As soon as the objective world of reality is considered, the passage of time disappears like a ghost into the night.”

Paul Davies (1946) British physicist

Page 222, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521291514.
Space and Time in the Modern Universe (1977)

World , Reality , Universe , Time

“It may be remarked incidentally that the recognition of the relational character of scientific objects completely eliminates an old metaphysical issue. One of the outstanding problems created by the rise of modern science was due to the fact that scientific definitions and descriptions are framed in terms of which qualities play no part. Qualities were wholly superfluous. As long as the idea persisted (an inheritance from Greek metaphysical science) that the business of knowledge is to penetrate into the inner being of objects, the existence of qualities like colors, sounds, etc., was embarrassing. The usual way of dealing with them is to declare that they are merely subjective, existing only in the consciousness of individual knowers. Given the old idea that the purpose of knowledge (represented at its best in science) is to penetrate into the heart of reality and reveal its "true" nature, the conclusion was a logical one. …The discovery of the nonscientific because of the empirically unverifiable and unnecessary character of absolute space, absolute motion, and absolute time gave the final coup de grâce to the traditional idea that solidity, mass, size, etc., are inherent possessions of ultimate individuals.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

Color , Way , Idea , Business

“The mental operation by which one achieves new concepts and which one denotes generally by the inadequate name of induction is not a simple but rather a very complicated process. Above all, it is not a logical process although such processes can be inserted as intermediary and auxiliary links. The principle effort that leads to the discovery of new knowledge is due to abstraction and imagination.”

Ernst Mach (1838–1916) Austrian physicist and university educator

3rd edition, p. 318ff, As quoted by Phillip Frank, Philosophy of Science: The Link Between Science and Philosophy (1957)
20th century, "Erkenntnis und Irrtum: Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung" (1905)

Imagination , Knowledge , Effort

“Comparatively few of the propositions and proofs in the Elements are his [Euclid's] own discoveries. In fact, the proof of the "Theorem of Pythagoras" is the only one directly ascribed to him.”

Florian Cajori book A History of Mathematics

Source: A History of Mathematics (1893), p. 30, Reported in Moritz (1914)

“The highest and ultimate personality values are declared to be independent of contrasts like rich and poor, healthy and sick, etc. The world had become accustomed to considering the social hierarchy, based on status, wealth, vital strength, and power, as an exact image of the ultimate values of morality and personality. The only way to disclose the discovery of anew and higher sphere of being and life, of the “kingdom of God” whose order is independent of that worldly and vital hierarchy, was to stress the vanity of the old values in this higher order.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1961), p. 98

Life , God , World , Way

“When you look at a great painting it's like a conversation. It has questions for you. It raises questions in you... Being an artist is about discovering things after you've done them. Like Cézanne – after twenty years of that mountain [Mont St. Victoire] he found out what he was doing. If it isn't a process of discovery, it shows. I'm in it for the long haul.”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

Kenneth Noland, p. 24
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Mountain , Question , Painting

“Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”

Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893–1986) Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937

Attributed to Szent-Györgyi in: IEEE (1985) Bridging the present and the future: IEEE Professional Communication Society conference record, Williamsburg, Virginia, October 16-18, 1985. p. 14.

Thinking

“To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies — the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said — there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Source: 1910s, A Book of Prefaces (1917), Ch. 2

Way , Search , Joy , Perfection

“.. I am always between two currents of thought, first the material difficulties, turning round and round to make a living; and second, study of color. I am always in hope of making a discovery there, to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones. To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of a light tone against a sombre background. To express hope by some star, the eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance. Certainly there is nothing in that of stereoscopic realism, but is it not some thing that actually exists?”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Arles, September 1888; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 531) p. 22
1880s, 1888

Love , Marriage , Hope , Color

“If the women but have little virtue, the jealousy of their husbands is extreme, and their revenge deadly and almost certain. A few inches of cold steel have been the punishment of many an unwary man, who has been guilty, perhaps, of nothing more than indiscretion. The difficulties of the attempt [to copulate with a married woman] are numerous, and the consequences of discovery fatal, in the better classes. With the unmarried women, too, great watchfulness is used. The main object of the parents is to marry their daughters well, and to this a fair name is necessary. The sharp eyes of a duena, and the ready weapons to a father or brother, are a protection which the characters of most of them — men and women — render by no means useless; for the very men who would lay down their lives to avenge the dishonor of their own family would risk the same lives to complete the dishonor of another.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. book Two Years Before the Mast

Referring to the Mexican residents of Santa Barbara in 1835 (p. 162)
Two Years Before the Mast (1840)

Women , Men , Jealousy , Family

Quotes about discovery page 4

Quotes about discovery
page 4