Discovery Quotes

A fish in a bowl thinks to know it all, for it has never seen the ocean.

~ Daniel Andersson

Facts, and facts alone, are the foundation of science... When one devotes oneself to experimental research it is in order to augment the sum of known facts, or to discover their mutual relations.

~ François Magendie

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.

~ Wilder Dwight Bancroft

This theory [the oxygen theory] is not as I have heard it described, that of the French chemists, it is mine (elle est la mienne); it is a property which I claim from my contemporaries and from posterity.

~ Antoine Lavoisier

I am not an outsider. I am an insider who discovered that everyone else had gone out.

~ Stephen J. Day

There is an undeniable exhilaration in moment of even the smallest discovery

~ Graham Moore

Yet the laboriously sought musical epiphany rarely compares to the unsought, even unwanted tune whose ambush is violent and sudden: the song the cab driver was tuned to, the song rumbling from the speaker wedged against the fire-escape railing, the song tingling from the transistor on the beach blanket. To locate those songs again can become, with age, something like a religious quest, as suggested by the frequent use of the phrase Holy Grail to describe hard-to-find tracks. The collector is haunted by the knowledge that somewhere on the planet an intact chunk of his past still exists, uncorrupted by time or circumstance.

~ Geoffrey O'brien

Children discover and verify their theories in quite the same way that scientists do: through experimentation. They manipulate the world and discover regularities of causation from those manipulations. Why do they do it? The discovery of regularities comes with a pleasurable burst of insight, which all of us, but especially children and scientists, continuously long for like bonbons or opium.

~ Matthew M. Hurley

I didn't know the demonsthat walked across your memory.They came from the dustwhen you were at peacein your grave.

~ Susie Clevenger

I feel like a child who has found a wonderful trail in the woods. Countless others have gone before and blazed the trail, but to the child it's as new and fresh as if it had never been walked before. The child is invariably anxious for others to join in the great adventure. It's something that can only be understood by actual experience. Those who've begun the journey, and certainly those who've gone further than I, will readily understand what I am saying.

~ Randy Alcorn

It was youWho opened meLooked into my soulTo study meYou revealed youTo uncover me.

~ David Somorai

Sara: Tegan just recently discovered that unicorns don’t exist. Tegan: I just thought they were extinct.

~ Tegan Quin

Truth is like a vast tree which yields more and more fruit the more you nurture it. The deeper the search in the mind of truth, the richer the discovery of the gems buried there.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Do not ignore inspiration, it is your guide to self discovery.

~ E'yen A. Gardner

How my life has been brought to undiscovered lands, and how much richer it gets - all from words printed on a page.... How a book can have 560 pages, but in only three pages change the reader's life.

~ Emoke B'racz

There are plenty of theories to listen to and follow but truth yearns to be discovered. When you find it, there is no doubt where to go.

~ E'yen A. Gardner

I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.

~ René Descartes

I've always adored the filmmaker Sam Fuller. The first time I watched 'Shock Corridor' was such a magnificent discovery. I love his lack of subtlety, the way he tackles serious topics with bold and inappropriate humor.

~ Lisa Lutz

If we can actually decrease the failure rate from nine out of 10 drugs failing in clinical trials and instead have seven out of 10 instead failing, that is a major victory for drug discovery and for people having better therapy.

~ Anne Wojcicki

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

~ Alexander Smith

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.

~ Thomas Merton

Kids are finding out about the potential for discovery online from other sources; many of them have computers at home, for instance, or their friends have them.

~ Daniel Greenberg

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.

~ Bertrand Russell

Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

~ Stephen Hawking

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

~ Paul Valéry

Networked science has the potential to speed up dramatically the rate of discovery across all of science.

~ Michael Nielsen

The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.

~ Mark Van Doren

My big running discovery was around Stanley Park in Vancouver. Miss it. That's a six-mile loop. Now I smile when I get four miles done. Age is a beast.

~ Michael Weatherly

The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity, than the discovery of a new star.

~ Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

My father-in-law gets up at 5 o'clock in the morning and watches the Discovery Channel. I don't know why there's this big rush to do this.

~ Jeff Foxworthy

When you awaken some morning and hear that somebody or other has been discovered, you can put it down as a fact that he discovered himself years ago - since that time he has been toiling, working, and striving to make himself worthy of general discovery.

~ James Whitcomb Riley

In archaeology, context is the basis of many discoveries that are imputed to the deliberate workings of intelligence. If I find a rock chipped in such a way as to give it a sharp edge, and the discovery is made in a cave, I am seduced into ascribing this to tool use by distant, fetid and furry ancestors.

~ Seth Shostak

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.

~ Max Planck

Chains do more than bargain down prices from suppliers or divide fixed costs across a lot of units. They rapidly spread economic discovery - the scarce and costly knowledge of what retail concepts and operational innovations actually work.

~ Virginia Postrel

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

~ Frank Herbert

I love the Discovery Channel. I love all sorts of medical shows.

~ Cote De Pablo

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.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful.

~ Charles Bradlaugh

Every great discovery I ever made, I gambled that the truth was there, and then I acted in faith until I could prove its existence.

~ Arthur H. Compton

Brands mature over time, like a marriage. The bond you feel with your spouse is different than when you first met each other. Excitement and discovery are replaced by comfort and depth.

~ Gary Vaynerchuk