Quotes About Discovery

Only then did he understand that he really wanted to know nothing about El Ga'a beyond the fact that it was isolated and unfrequented, that it was precisely those things he had been trying to ascertain about it.

It is a dangerous discovery, because they are going to disregard many vital things in their haste to catch up.

Matthias Hopkins, commonly called "witchfinder general," took advantage of the disorders of the English civil wars of the seventeenth century and made a special business of the discovery of witches. He was quite successful, until his own methods were tried on his own person, and as he did not sink in the water ordeal, the people declared him to be a wizard and slew him (1647).

There was earth inside them, and they dug.

Reality is not simply there, it does not simply exist: it must be sought out and won.

Are you ready to bring back a weapon from another world?

DI Cartwright: The cat is booby trapped? DI Quill: Welcome to my world.

Peter thought that he had noticed the shine of tears in her eyes, though of course it couldn't be so, since he had never heard of cats shedding tears. It was only later he was to learn that they could both laugh and cry.

You can go anywhere in books

Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that's unthinkable. Natural

What made the Florentines rich in 1200 was the discovery of new techniques for making the high-tech product of the time, fine woven cloth. What made the Dutch rich in 1600 was the discovery of shipbuilding and navigation techniques that enabled them to dominate the seas of the Far East.

A mountaintop is not simply an elevation, but an island, a world within a world, a place out of place.

Wildness is not found but revealed.

This is a book. It is a book I found in a box. I found the box in the attic. The box was in the attic, under the eaves. The attic was hot and still. The air was stale with dust. The dust was from old pictures and books. The dust in the air was made up of the book I found. I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.

Without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery, any progress

We need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit.

What Mendeleyev was looking for amongst the elements appeared to be something very similar: a pattern listing the elements

Mendeleyev had realized that when the elements were listed in order of their atomic weights, their properties repeated in a series of periodic intervals. For this reason, he named his discovery the Periodic Table of the Elements.

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.

Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.

I wanted something altogether wilder, the clumsier romance of strangeness.

So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.

Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.

All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting.