Quotes About Discovery

Discovery should come as an adventure rather than as the result of a logical process of thought. Sharp, prolonged thinking is necessary that we may keep on the chosen road but it does not itself necessarily lead to discovery. The investigator must be ready and on the spot when the light comes from whatever direction.

The beginning of civilisation is the discovery of some useful arts, by which men acquire property, comforts, or luxuries. The necessity or desire of preserving them leads to laws and social institutions. The discovery of peculiar arts gives superiority to particular nations ... to subjugate other nations, who learn their arts, and ultimately adopt their manners;- so that in reality the origin as well as the progress and improvement of civil society is founded in mechanical and chemical inventions.

You don't have to meditate. You don't have to practice self-discovery and Buddhism. You should only practice self-discovery if you really have had it with the human world.

The most remarkable discovery ever made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing.

In the world's history certain inventions and discoveries occurred, of peculiar value, on account of their great efficiency in facilitating all other inventions and discoveries. Of these were the art of writing and of printing - the discovery of America, and the introduction of Patent-laws. The date of the first ... is unknown; but it certainly was as much as fifteen hundred years before the Christian era; the second-printing-came in 1436, or nearly three thousand years after the first. The others followed more rapidly - the discovery of America in 1492, and the first patent laws in 1624.

I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.

The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science.

Chefs don't do ponytails and we shouldn't do them because I guarantee that whenever there's a discovery of hair in the food, it's guaranteed it's from the chef's ponytail.

... How is it [, then] that the leaders of our society have seen fit to try to eliminate this one very important means of learning and self-discovery, this means which has been used, respected, and honored for thousands of years, in every human culture of which we have a record?

There is a beautiful expression of this in the Chandogya Upanishad: 'There is this City of Brahman, (that is the body), and in this city there is a shrine, and in that shrine there is a small lotus, and in that lotus there is a small space, (akasa). Now what exists within that small space, that is to be sought, that is to be understood.' This is the great discovery of the Upanishads, this inner shrine, this guha, or cave of the heart, where the inner meaning of life, of all human existence, is to be found.

There is no more discovery. Not since the beginning of this century. There are new gadgets. New important gadgets.

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

Barack Obama's discovering what a nightmare dealing with hostage problems is - a discovery previously made by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, i don't see a lot of room for change in American policy.

I use [Heraclitus' discovery of] enantiodromia for the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time. This characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, onesided tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently breaks through the conscious control.

So I had to figure out for myself what was right and true. It was a search. It was a process. It drew on the moral sense that I'd learned from my parents, and in church, and in my own heart, and led me on my own journey of discovery.

It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm.

After all these years, I am still involved in the process of self-discovery. It's better to explore life and make mistakes than to play it safe. Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.

The phosphorous smell which is developed when electricity (to speak the profane language) is passing from the points of a conductor into air, or when lightning happens to fall upon some terrestrial object, or when water is electrolysed, has been engaging my attention the last couple of years, and induced me to make many attempts at clearing up that mysterious phenomenon. Though baffled for a long time, at last, I think, I have succeeded so far as to have got the clue which will lead to the discovery of the true cause of the smell in question.

You can experience the thrill of discovery, the incredible, visceral feeling of doing something no one has ever done before, see things no one has ever seen before, know something no one has ever known before. ... Welcome to science, you're gonna like it here.

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

The element of discovery is very important. I don't repeat myself well. I want and need that stimulus of walking forward from one new world to another.

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can't stand it.

Without the discovery of uniformities there can be no concepts, no classifications, no formulations, no principles, no laws; and without these no science can exist.

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.

Economic progress means the discovery and application of better ways of doing things to satisfy our wants. The piping of water to a household that previously dragged it from a well, the growing of two blades of grass where one grew before, the development of a power loom that enables one man to weave ten times as much as he could before, the use of steam power and electric power instead of horse or human power - all these things clearly represent economic progress.

Case of Johnson v. M'Intosh is continued to be cited today by the Supreme Court. Even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the most liberal member of the court, in footnote one of opinion she wrote several years ago involving the Oneida Nation cites the Doctrine of Discovery. The court never questions it.

Change only favours minds that are diligently looking and preparing for discovery.

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

The sure ways to create new ventures of discovery are to keep an open mind.

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.

Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

As the mother of a son, I do not accept that alienation from me is necessary for his discovery of himself. As a woman, I will not cooperate in demeaning womanly things so that he can be proud to be a man. I like to think the women in my son's future are counting on me.

Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.

Organization is simply the means by which the acts of ordinary men can be made to add up to extraordinary results. To this idea of progress that does not wait on some lucky break, some chance discovery, or some rare stroke of genius, but instead is achieved through systematic, cumulative effort, the engineer has contributed brilliantly.

We can distinguish three groups of scientific men. In the first and very small group we have the men who discover fundamental relations. Among these are van't Hoff, Arrhenius and Nernst. In the second group we have the men who do not make the great discovery but who see the importance and bearing of it, and who preach the gospel to the heathen. Ostwald stands absolutely at the head of this group. The last group contains the rest of us, the men who have to have things explained to us.

..the real world's all we've got. Believers in the supernatural claim to have special wisdom about the world. But real wisdom means knowing truth from falsehood, knowing the difference between evidence and wishful thinking. Yes, the real world is mysterious and sometimes frightening. But would the supernatural make it better? The real world has beauty, poetry, love and the joy of honest discovery. Isn't that enough?

The discovery of dance has changed my life in unimaginable ways.

It is extraordinary to see how the discovery of one single free stroke of paint can fill you with such joy and amazement.

When physiologists revealed the existence and functions of hormones they not only gave increased opportunities for the activities of biochemists but in particular gave a new charter to biochemical thought, and with the discovery of vitamins that charter was extended.

When I reach to the edge of the universe, I do so knowing that along some paths of cosmic discovery, there are times when, at least for now, one must be content to love the questions themselves.

We must leave the discovery of this mystery, like all others, to time, and accident, and Heaven's pleasure.

On the day a country decides not to invest a cent in innovation, discovery or exploration, that country decides to be a tributary to others.

I know there are epic tales of romance, where love means you're supposed to die. Where it's all about sacrifice. But I don't want to die. I don't want Stephen to die. I'm looking for the scenario where we both get to live. Where we can continue this marvel that is love and discovery and trust.

I also discovered that I was a poet. From the standpoint of one's family this is probably a regrettable discovery.

As was to be expected, the discovery of the nervous apparatus of the salivary glands immediately impelled physiologists to seek a similar apparatus in other glands lying deeper in the digestive canal.

Take the level of dedication that anyone had to get to the top in any field, and apply it to self-discovery. Except that when you get to the top of anything else, it washes away. You will die. The only thing that stays with you forever is your awareness.

The scientist finds his reward in what Henri Poincare calls the joy of comprehension, and not in the possibility of application to which any discovery may lead.

Electronic music was just discovery about sound, all our sound options. The core percussions and melodies, they forget about it, they didn't think about those those for a good four, five years, because they were just discovering the new tools and what they could do with them, you know? The big folk revival, I think is a backlash against that. And now, I think they'll probably try to find somewhere in the middle. It's interesting. It's like push-and-pull. It's always like that, you know? Music history is always like that, this repeating evolution of music.