Quotes About Discovery

Any man who devotes that much time . . . must of necessity make discoveries of great value to others.

He had never heard that more gold has been mined from the brains of men than has ever been taken from the earth.

Fortunate, indeed, is the person who has discovered how to give sex emotion an outlet through some form of creative effort, for he has, by that discovery, lifted himself to the status of a genius.

An enemy discovered is an enemy half whipped.

The majority of men never learn that the urge of sex has other possibilities, which far transcend in importance, that of mere physical expression. The majority of those who make this discovery, do so after having wasted many years at a period when the sex energy is at its height, prior to the age of fortyfive to fifty. This usually is followed by noteworthy achievement.

After he had reviewed in his mind all of his former interviews, he made another discovery so important in nature that it should become known to every man who is engaged in the business of selling life insurance. He discovered that life insurance is sold to the life insurance salesman himself. Sold before he ever calls upon his prospective buyer. Sold by his own mental attitude. His own faith. His own conviction that every man should provide himself with this sort of economic security.

Edison concentrated upon the work of harmonizing natural laws

Your big opportunity may be right where you are.

the greatest inventor who ever lived.

A better definition of a genius is, "a man who has discovered how to increase the intensity of thought to the point where he can freely communicate with sources of knowledge not available through the ordinary rate of thought.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.

Rational flâneur (or just flâneur): Someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision opportunistically at every step to revise his schedule (or his destination) so he can imbibe things based on new information obtained. In research and entrepreneurship, being a flâneur is called "looking for optionality.

Pasteur said, like all great discoverers, he knew something about accidental discoveries. The best way to get maximal exposure is to keep researching. Collect opportunities--

The story of the wheel also illustrates the point of this chapter: both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discovery, precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism, they look for the complicated, the lurid, the newsworthy, the narrated, the scientistic, and the grandiose, rarely for the wheel on the suitcase. Simplicity, I realized, does not lead to laurels.

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say.

The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, aggressive risk bearing rather than formal education.

Science isn't the sum of what scientists think, but exactly as with markets. Had science operated by majority consensus, we would be still stuck in the Middle Ages.

Someone who did not find something is providing others with knowledge, the best knowledge, that of absence (what does not work)—yet he gets little or no credit for it.

for decades doctors never suspected that this "useless" tissue might actually have a use that escaped their detection. The

If you think that the inventions we see around us came from someone sitting in a cubicle and concocting them according to a timetable, think again: almost everything of the moment is the product of serendipity.

the researcher has the incentive to select the experiment that corresponds to what he was looking for, hiding the failed attempts.

Engineers tend to develop tools for the pleasure of developing tools, not to induce nature to yield its secrets.

The laser is a prime illustration of a tool made for a given purpose (actually no real purpose) that then found applications that were not even dreamed of at the time. It was a typical "solution looking for a problem.

I was told that a scientist managed the company and that he had the instinct, as a scientist, to just let scientists look wherever their instinct took them. Commercialization came later.