quotations about discovery
Sometimes a clearly defined error is the only way to discover the truth.
BENJAMIN WIKER
The Mystery of the Periodic Table
The child set upon discovery is like a wide-eyed fish intent upon a worm. Your response has the power to reel him in--or to lose his interest entirely.
MOLLY O'SHAUGHNESSY
Just Write
For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery--that most unstable existential moment--the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions.
RICHARD RHODES
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
I believe one has to escape oneself to discover oneself.
RABIH ALAMEDDINE
I, The Divine
The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD
Process and Reality
The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to--the one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Philosophical Investigations
Discoveries are always accidental; and the great use of science is by investigating the nature of the effects produced by any process or contrivance, and of the causes by which they are brought about, to explain the operation and determine the precise value of every new invention. This fixes as it were the latitude and longitude of each discovery, and enables us to place it in that part of the map of human knowledge which it ought to occupy. It likewise enables us to use it in taking bearings and distances, and in shaping our course when we go in search of new discoveries.
BENJAMIN GRAF VON RUMFORD
The Collected Works of Count Rumford
Call the Smithsonian I made a discovery
Life ain't forever and lunch isn't free
Loved ones will break your heart with or without you
Turns out we don't get to know everything
THE AVETT BROTHERS
"Smithsonian", True Sadness
The world is my coloring book
Look, new discoveries every time
When I color outside the lines
MIKE POSNER
"Colors of You", Gravitas
There are, and in our nature there ever must be, a diversity of opinions and affections. Experience seems to teach, that in the society where these are most freely expressed--where men most freely emulate each other in endeavours to promote their favourite views--the greatest discoveries are made, and the greatest actions are performed.
GEORGE OLIVER
History of Freemasonry
Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.
ALBERT SZENT-GYORGYI
Yoga Journal, Sep-Oct. 1987
Scientific discovery is like slowly peeling an onion -- while exploring one question, other, more nuanced questions are revealed beneath (and sometimes, a lot of tears are shed along the way).
LISA FELDMAN BARRETT
remarks before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, September 18, 2009
This world of sense, built by the imagination--how fair and foul it is! Like a fairy island in the sea of life, it smiles in sunlight and sleeps in green, known of the world not by communion of knowledge, but by personal, secret discovery!
JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND
Gold-Foil
All we discover has been with us since the sun began to roll; and much we discover, is not worth the discovering.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Mardi
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.
BRENNAN MANNING
The Ragamuffin Gospel
History shows that new discoveries are always just over the horizon.
HARRY LEVINE
Medical Imaging
No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.
ISAAC NEWTON
attributed, The Art of Scientific Investigation
Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.
STANISLAW LEM
Solaris
Discovery is new beginning. It is the origin of new rules that supplement, or even supplant, the old. Genius is creative. It is genius precisely because it disregards established routines, because it originates the novelties that will be the routines of the future. Were there rules for discovery, then discoveries would be mere conclusions.
BERNARD LONERGAN
Insight: A Study of Human Understanding
Discovery is the ability to see what everybody else has seen and to think what nobody else has thought.
JEROME BRUNER
"The Act of Discovery", Harvard Educational Review, 1961