Quotes About Discovery

Ideas are the dark matter of the universe. We know it's there, but only those "in the know" can see them.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic—being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

Go to the bookstore. Find a topic you would be willing to read five hundred books on.

When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.

Love was a country he knew nothing about.

I remember what it was...to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete.

People are full of surprise, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough.

Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility. Loving of children, raising of children. The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if the society itself did not go through so many terrors which it doesn't want to admit. The discovery of one's sexual preference doesn't have to be a trauma. It's a trauma because it's such a traumatized society.

I remember what it was like...to be young, very young. When everything, touching and tasting-everything- was so new, and even suffering was wonderful because it was so complete. James Baldwin

When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

I am saying that a journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do with what you find, or what you find will do to you.

We had our arms around each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find.

There were so many things one did not dare to know. And were they all patiently waiting, like demons in the dark, to spring from hiding, to reveal themselves, on some rainy Sunday morning?

And everything was different. I was walking through streets I had never seen before. The faces around me, I had never seen. We moved in silence which was music from everywhere.

It occurred to him that the question was not really what he was going to get but how he was to discover his possibilities and become reconciled to them.

this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering—enough is certainly as good as a feast—but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.

Ca ne manque, les chambres. The work is full of rooms—big rooms, little rooms, round rooms, square ones, rooms high up, rooms low down—all kinds of rooms! What kind of room do you think Giovanni should be living in? How long do you think it took me to find the room I have? And since when, since when'—he stopped and beat with his forefinger on my chest—'have you so hated the room? Since when? Since yesterday, since always? Dis-moi.

We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.

At the same time he realized how far they were above the city and the lights below seemed to be calling him. He walked to the balcony's edge and looked over. Looking straight down, he seemed to be standing on a cliff in the wilderness, seeing a kingdom and a river which had not been seen before.

something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me

People are full of surprises, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough.

We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations. We know how a person, in such a paralysis, is unable to assess either his weaknesses or his strengths, and how frequently indeed he mistakes one for the other.

Nobody, no man and no woman, is precisely what they think they are. Love is where you find it. You don't know where it'll carry you, and it's a terrifying thing, love. It's the only possibility but it's terrifying.

I've got to accept limitations before I can discover my possibilities.