Quotes About Discovery

It seemed like my professional life would take a more scientific route. I guess that plan started to become undone when, at the age of 17, I happened upon a screening of Alain Resnais' 'Hiroshima Mon Amour,' and it took my breath away.

Yet when one suspects that a man knows something about life that one hasn't heard before one is uneasy until one has found out what he has to say.

I was very uneasy about going into cosmology because the experimental observations were so modest.

It would be better, in a way, if any adults present were completely uneducated. There is nothing children like more than passing on information they have just discovered to people who may not already have it - an elderly grandmother, for instance.

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

Sometimes life takes you on unexpected paths, and those paths aren't always in the same direction.

I'm looking for the unexpected. I'm looking for things I've never seen before.

Everyone's opened a drawer and been startled by the unexpected discovery of an old mobile phone that now resembles an outsized pantomime prop. To think you used to be impressed by this clunky breezeblock. You were like a caveman gawping at a yo-yo.

Travelling the railways of Europe with a century-old guidebook can be disconcerting: fares, food, and drink seem shockingly expensive compared with what they were; trains and paddle-steamers run to unexpected timetables (assuming they're still running at all); and not only states but whole empires have been wiped from the map.

Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in itself, full of passionate encounters, contradictory judgments, striking discoveries, and unexpected reversals.

Especially on unexpected journeys, you have time; you can figure certain deeper things out, like who you are and what you want. That's why I enjoy journeys.

The big lesson of planetary science is when you do a first reconnaissance of a new kind of object, you should expect the unexpected.

The thing that has appealed to me most about this career is getting to encounter and interact with the unexpected.

There is the morass, wherein you plunge up to your knees, or the walking over the stubborn, dwarfish shrubbery, whereby one treads down the forests of Labrador; and the unexpected bunting or sylvia which perchance, and indeed as if by chance alone, you now and then see flying before you, or hear singing from the ground creeping plant.

I want to go to places that are unexpected of me because people really think they have me pegged.

When I was a teenager, I was like, 'Something is wrong with me. I don't fit in. I'm not like everybody else.' So, I always knew that I wanted to explore and move on, but it was completely unexpected, the way it happened.

Mistakes can be good things, because it is an unexpected thing.

You travel with the hope that something unexpected will happen. It has to do with enjoying being lost and figuring it out and the satisfaction. I always get a little disappointed when I know too well where I'm going, or when I've lived in a place so long that there's no chance I could possibly get lost.

Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific - this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.

Journalists often ask me when I go to the field, 'What do you expect to find?' And my answer always is, 'The unexpected,' because we're just looking at the tip of the iceberg; we've just scratched the surface.

When you can type a few words into a search engine and land on your topic - or when you can scan a Shakespeare play for specific words or symbols - what opportunities might you miss to expand your thinking in unexpected ways?

In her previous novels, Maggie O'Farrell has often measured the distance between intimates and the unexpected intimacy of distance - geographic, temporal, cultural. In 'The Hand That First Held Mine' and 'The Distance Between Us,' characters separated by many miles or many years turn out to be joined in ways they never anticipated.

Computers can't find the unexpected, but people can when they eyeball the data.

I didn't know I could even be a professional tennis player, honestly. All this is actually very, very unexpected.