Quotes About Discovery

A great discovery solves a great problem, but there is a grain of discovery in the solution of any problem. Your problem may be modest, but if it challenges your curiosity and brings into play your inventive faculties, and if you solve it by your own means, you may experience the tension and enjoy the triumph of 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.

What makes me put pen to paper? You know, that's the million-dollar question. I've been writing since I've been reading. It's not a question I think that's even meant to be answered, but it's something you always seek to discover the answer to. And the process of filmmaking is one of discovery, and self-discovery at that. Pleasure... it's not exactly what I would call fun, but it's absorbing.

When you ask why did some particular question occur to a scientist or philosopher for the first time, or why did this particular approach seem natural, then your questions concern the context of discovery. When you ask whether the argument the philosopher puts forth to answer that question is sound, or whether the evidence justifies the scientific theory proposed, then you've entered the context of justification. Considerations of history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology are relevant to the context of discovery, but not to justification.

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem.

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.

The discovery that peace, happiness and love are ever-present within our own Being, and completely available at every moment of experience, under all conditions, is the most important discovery that anyone can make.

Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery; it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have a trained scientific eye even to recognize it after that.

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.

Nature has not been lavish in her endowments, but each person has his or her own potential in terms of achievement and service. The awareness of that potential is the discovery of purpose; the fulfillment of that potential is the discovery of strength.

Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.

I think about photographs as being full, or empty. You picture something in a frame and it's got lots of accounting going on in it-stones and buildings and trees and air - but that's not what fills up a frame. You fill up the frame with feelings, energy, discovery, and risk, and leave room enough for someone else to get in there.

Courage is the discovery that you may not win, and trying when you know you can lose.

Even before the discovery of copper South Australia had turned the corner.

If we want authenticity, we have to initiate it. Self-discovery takes us to the wildest places on earth

Of necessity, we made the discovery that it is easier to turn poets into business journalists than to turn bookkeepers into writers.

Editors seek out the first novels with the seductiveness of Don Juans; the pleasure of discovery is one of the obvious reasons.

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 though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems.

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

The reality of en-masse inner transformation of human beings by self-realisation is the most revolutionary discovery of the present age.

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist

The mess of the human condition is that fundamental trust has not yet been realized. The true value of profound spiritual experience lies in the discovery of that fundamental trust.

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.

I love being onstage. I love the relationship with the audience. I love the letting go, the sense of discovery, the improvising.

Can anything match that first fine discovery of the telephone and all it stood for? That first realization that, contained within ten simple digits, lay the infinitely possible? Out there ... lay six billion ears, all the people in the world available for contact and mystery and insult, unable to resist the beckoning of one small and villainous forefinger.

Writing is a process of discovering. I could never outline a narrative; that just sounds boring. There's no joy of discovery in what you're doing if that's your strategy.

Having come to realize in the first stage of meditation that we are not our bodies, in the second stage we make an even more astounding discovery; we are not our minds either.

There are some people who cannot get onto a train without imagining that they are about to voyage into the significant unknown; as though the notion of movement were inseparably connected with the notion of discovery, as though each displacement of the body were a displacement of the soul.

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

Real spiritual journey in life is the discovery of self. I think once you take all the religious bullshit away from Jesus Christ, it's saying it's about this journey of discovering who you are, and what's really important in life is simply love. That the journey of civilization, the journey of understanding, is forgiveness, is empathy. And that's what humanity is striving for.

Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view.

The greatest discovery in life is to discover that our essential nature does not share the limits nor the destiny of the body and mind.

While the vaccine discovery was progressive, the joy I felt at the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the world one of its greatest calamities [smallpox], blended with the fond hope of enjoying independence and domestic peace and happiness, was often so excessive that, in pursuing my favourite subject among the meadows, I have sometimes found myself in a kind of reverie.

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

If you are going to ask me what I watch on TV, I would probably have to say the majority of it is stuff on SyFy or Discovery Channel or it's about ghost seekers.

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

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.

There's definitely something broken in the music industry clearly. Partly from downloading and partly the obstacles for discovery and listener choice and artist distribution are gone.

With time, many of the facts I learned were forgotten but I never lost the excitement of discovery.

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

The charm of a woodland road lies not only in its beauty but in anticipation. Around each bend may be a discovery, an adventure.

To realize that one is really alone, gives new courage to the person. Discovery of truth is a journey, a voyage on which one has to launch alone. You cannot impose the inquiry of truth in the heart of your partner. You cannot compel your partner to have the same intensity or the same depth of inquiry. So irrespective of where you are, the voyage has to be launched upon alone. Taking the inward journey and arriving at silence, is a voyage in solitude.

Effective health care depends on self-care; this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.

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.

Because of the control of the media by corporate wealth, the discovery of truth depends on an alternative media, such as small radio stations, networks, programs. Also, alternative newspapers, which exist all over the country. Also, cable TV programs, which are not dependent on commercial advertising. Also, the internet, which can reach millions of people by-passing the conventional media.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.

Reasoning is compared to understanding as movement is to rest, or acquisition to possession.... Since movement always proceeds from something immovable, and ends in something at rest, hence it is that human reasoning, in the order of inquiry and discovery, proceeds from certain things absolutely understood--namely, the first principles; and, again, in the order of judgment, returns by analysis to first principles, in the light of which it examines what it has found. Now it is clear that rest and movement are not to be referred to different powers, but to one and the same.

If the European discovery had been delayed for a century or two, it is possible that the Aztec in Mexico or the Iroquois in North America would have established strong native states capable of adopting European war tactics and maintaining their independence to this day, as Japan kept her independence from China.