Quotes About Discovery

Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth-century invention.

The rise of placelessness, on top of the sense that the whole planet is now minutely known and surveilled, has given this dissatisfaction a radical edge, creating an appetite to find places that are off the map and that are somehow secret, or at least have the power to surprise us.

That morning I'd read that construction workers in London had discovered a young fox living off their leftover sandwiches on the unfinished seventy-second floor of the Shard, the UK's tallest building.

Far from dotting the globe with fabulous islands, the naval powers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remorselessly tracked down any and all such rumors and either confirmed or disproved them. As a result, the 1875 revised Admiralty Pacific chart discarded 123 unreal islands.

In a fully discovered world exploration does not stop; it just has to be reinvented.

See the opportunities for adventures, not the constraints that get in the way.

Adventure is a loose word that means different things to different people. It is a state of mind, a spirit of trying something new and leaving your comfort zone. Adventure is about enthusiasm, ambition, open-mindedness and curiosity. If this is true, then 'adventure' is not only crossing deserts and climbing mountains; adventure can be found everywhere, every day, and it is up to us to seek it out.

But that was good enough for me, because adventure doesn't always have to be about climbing K2. Just getting out there and doing something is sometimes good enough. In fact, you shouldn't even compare your trip with climbing K2. You should compare it with the realistic alternative that faces most people with busy lives and tight diaries, which is doing no adventure at all.

When you travel, the world comes real and three-dimensional, impossibly vivid

I now believe there is something even more important than striving for the remarkable. And that is to stop dreaming about an adventure of a lifetime, and instead pursue a lifetime of living adventure through a daily pledge to push myself a little, scare myself now and then and remain curious

Maps are an invitation to adventure. Snow was falling and I was in a grubby, windowless room next to a pig. That was not on my map.

No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.

And the knowledge that humanity was not alone in the universe would be as relevant to most as the knowledge that protons were built of quarks.

We should have brought a torch," he was saying. "We have been to Saturn and back and we didn't bring a torch.

Having created these cognitively enhanced creatures, the safest option at the time appeared to be to launch them into interstellar space.

We all have it in us to be something other than what we are, I thought, but we don't often get a glimpse of what we could have been. Most of us are better off for the not knowing.

Might you show me how to project a schematic of the entire inner solar system? I appear to be unable to zoom out from the immediate neighbourhood of Paladin." "Access that sub-menu, then select the logarithmic scale factor," Nissa said. "Thank you—I should have seen that." The

We're still fumbling in the dark, trying to find out how to live on a galactic scale.

Probably fake anyway," Adrana said, with a knowing sniff, as if she had plenty of experience in this area. "C'mon. Don't want to dawdle, not when there's so much to see. The next one's a Limb Broker.

I want to make sense of the world, Doctor. I want to undo the screws, take off its elegant face, glimpse the glittering movement, poke around in the gears and then decide if it's broken or not. Then I want to know if there is anything we can do to put it back together again. There may not be, but at least we'd have the satisfaction of knowing.' ' We'd be satisfied by our own impotence?' ' We won't know until we try

It was good to be loved, good to love another human being – even in the belly of a starship arrowing for unmapped space.

The fun for me is to mix it all up. I would actually like to do something as far away from what I've just done, just for my own personal joy and growth, for what I want to do.

I think the Internet has made it easier for people to connect with things that they really like, as well as provide a more personal experience, of 'I found this!' and then you can pass it to friends.

Sometimes you develop a passion for something because of some personal experience.