Quotes About Discovery

“One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries.”
― A.A. Milne

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“I find out a lot about myself by sleeping. Dreams, they are who I am when I’m too tired to be me.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale

“Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

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

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― André Gide

“She wanted to write about something other then love. Yet her freethinking pen seemed more adhered to her heart then to her head. A battle she never felt worth fighting.”
― Coco J. Ginger

“There's something liberating about not pretending. Dare to embarrass yourself. Risk.”
― Drew Barrymore

“When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.”
― Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction

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

“Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It's a fact—everyone is ignorant in some way or another.

Ignorance is our deepest secret.

And it is one of the scariest things out there, because those of us who are most ignorant are also the ones who often don't know it or don't want to admit it.

Here is a quick test:

If you have never changed your mind about some fundamental tenet of your belief, if you have never questioned the basics, and if you have no wish to do so, then you are likely ignorant.

Before it is too late, go out there and find someone who, in your opinion, believes, assumes, or considers certain things very strongly and very differently from you, and just have a basic honest conversation.

It will do both of you good.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in there jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journy of exploration and discovery.”
― David Almond

“When you are inquisitive, Jane, you always make me smile. You open your eyes like an eager bird, and make every now and then a restless movement, as if answers in speech did not flow fast enough for you, and you wanted to read the tablet of one's heart.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.”
― Bertrand Russell

“No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.”
― Isaac Newton

“I said I *liked* being half-educated; you were so much more *surprised* at everything when you were ignorant.”
― Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

“Give me but a firm spot on which to stand, and I shall move the earth.”
― Archimedes, The Works of Archimedes

“You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city...you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything changes.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren

“A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“I would rather be an artist than a leader. Ironically, a leader has to follow the rules.”
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

“It's like looking through a microscope your whole life," he (Justin) said. "You miss the whole picture. Sometimes you need to get lost in order to discover anything.”
― Katie Kacvinsky, Awaken

“Lands of great discoveries are also lands of great injustices.”
― Ivo Andrić

“The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.”
― Wally Lamb, The Hour I First Believed

“Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams - day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain-machinery whizzing - are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization.”
― L. Frank Baum, The Lost Princess of Oz

“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“It is ... through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place. The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories. Sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which she had thought must be rather stupid. She had no intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider awake every day which passed at Misselthwaite.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.”
― Ezra Pound

“They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they can see nothing but sea.”
― Francis Bacon