Quotations: Discovery

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

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.
Daniel J Boorstin

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

Through every rift of discovery some seeming anomaly drops out of the darkness, and falls, as a golden link into the great chain of order.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin

The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.
Joseph Conrad

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.
Marie Curie

In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.
Will Durant

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant

The discovery of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the discovery of America almost 500 years earlier. In the case of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.
Barbara Ehrenreich

There are those whose sole claim to profundity is the discovery of exceptions to the rules.
Paul Eldridge

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know.
Joanna Field

My poetry is a way of coming to grips with reality . . . a way of discovery and definition. It is a way of solving for the unknowns.
Robert Hayden

The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.
Frank Herbert

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

Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
James Joyce

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
Arthur Koestler

The discovery of the North Pole is one of those realities which could not be avoided. It is the wages which human perseverance pays itself when it thinks that something is taking too long.
Karl Kraus

The essence of living is discovering. Indeed, it is the joy of discovery that makes life worth the effort.
Vijay Krishna

Whenever I found out anything remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof.
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being. . .
Walter Lippmann

The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.
Andre Malraux

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort.
H L Mencken

The secret of concentration is the secret of self-discovery. You reach inside yourself to discover your personal resources, and what it takes to match them to the challenge.
Arnold Palmer

The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust

It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.
Ayn Rand

The delights of self-discovery are always available.
Gail Sheehy

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.
Samuel Smiles

Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.
Alexander Smith

The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy. . .
Susan Sontag

The real meaning of travel, like that of a conversation by the fireside, is the discovery of oneself through contact with other people, and its condition is self-commitment in the dialogue.
Paul Tournier

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked . . .
Mark Twain

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