Quotes About Discovery

Hardcore History by

a Barnes and Noble with no goal in particular, I chance upon a book about suicide. It's right there in front of me on a display table. Perhaps this is the "miracle"? I sit down and read the entire book, taking copious notes into a journal, including other books listed in the bibliography.

What you seek is seeking you." —RUMI

That cliché you ignored like a throwaway fortune cookie? Suddenly it makes sense and moves mountains. Conversely, things you initially found enlightening might run their course, like a wonderful high school coach who needs to hand you off to a college coach for you to reach the next level.

Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. Big, undreamed-of things—the people on the edge see them first." —Kurt Vonnegut

the best opportunities may not even catch your attention at first. More often than not, great opportunities look unattractive on the surface. What makes an opportunity great is upside. If the potential upside were explicitly clear, the opportunity would have already been taken.

To become "successful," you have to say "yes" to a lot of experiments. To learn what you're best at, or what you're most passionate about, you have to throw a lot against the wall.

Productivity is for robots. What humans are going to be really good at is asking questions, being creative, and experiences.

Mariage Frères Marco Polo black tea)

Don't worry about making money. Don't stress about having a plan. Don't think about networking or setting yourself up for the next thing. Try as hard as you possibly can to find something you love, because the depressing reality is that most people never find a career that they're truly passionate about.

Timothy Ferriss

Work is when you confront the problems you might otherwise be tempted to run away from. Work is how you settle your financial and emotional debts—so that your travels are not an escape from your real life, but a discovery of your real life.

What I discovered, which is what many writers discover, is that I write in order to think. I'd say, 'I think I have an idea,' but when I begin to write it, I realize, 'I have no idea,' and I don't actually know what I think until I try and write it. . . . That was the revelation.

Because being wrong is just an opportunity to find more of the truth.

Science isn't about being right preemptively or knowing the answer. Science is motivated by the human drive to struggle to discover.

Nestled in the tropics of the Coral Sea, New Caledonia was a French territory and where Julie and Marc had just sold the sailboat that took them 15,000 miles around the world. Of course, recouping their initial investment had been part of the plan. All said and done, their 15-month exploration of the globe, from the gondola-rich waterways of Venice to the tribal shores of Polynesia, had cost between $18,000 and $19,000. Less than rent and baguettes in Paris.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg

Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility. From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises.

So the goal isn't to get good ideas; the goal is to get bad ideas. Because once you get enough bad ideas, then some good ones have to show up.

Always take jobs for which you are not qualified; that way you will inevitably learn something.

For every stage in life, you discover books that speak to you, that help you change, to become the version of yourself that you need to be. It's so very difficult to choose one book.

Throw it all up on the wall and see what sticks.

while the world is a gold mine, you need to go digging in other people's heads to unearth riches.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the most-gifted book of several people in this book, as well as in a wonderful short documentary called The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.