Quotes About Discovery

Rejecting authority in regard to knowledge was not just a matter of abstract analysis. It was a necessary condition for progress, because, before the Enlightenment, it was generally believed that everything important that was knowable had already been discovered, and was enshrined in authoritative sources such as ancient writings and traditional assumptions. Some of those sources did contain some genuine knowledge, but it was entrenched in the form of dogmas along with many falsehoods

Even if you find what you are looking for, you may discover its not worth the price.

Columbus says he decided to send "two men up-country" to see what they could see. "They traveled for three days," he wrote, "and found an infinite number of small villages and people without number, but nothing of importance."35 People without number—but nothing of importance. It would become a motto for the ages.

Science cannot promise eternal truths; only the elimination of false hypotheses and the establishment of what is currently the most likely explanation of an aspect of reality

Según él, de lo que se trataba no era de que nos guste leer o nos deje de gustar, sino más bien de saber cómo hallar el libro que nos corresponde. A todo el mundo le puede encantar leer si se cumple la condición de tener en las manos la novela adecuada, la que nos va a gustar, la que nos va a decir algo y que no podremos soltar.

According to him, it was not a question of liking or not liking to read, but of finding the book that was meant for you. Everybody could love reading, as long as they had the right book in their hands, a book that spoke to them, a book they could not bear to part with.

Le livre que l'on cherche n'est par forcément celui que l'on doit lire. Il faut regarder celui d'à côté.

Il y a des théories sur le rangement des livres. Notamment celle du bon voisinage. Le livre que l'on cherche n'est pas forcément celui que l'on doit lire. Il faut regarder celui d'à côté.

When Europeans "discovered" Australia in 1522, the native inhabitants had no recognizable gambling, but the gambling spirit has found a welcome home on the continent in the years since.

V: You were everything to me, Stanley. Everything. S: You still love me? V: It's like a big stone in the road. S: And all those others? V: You know the way a bat bounces sounds off objects to find out where it is?

Sidney Harman, another highly successful CEO who was largely self-educated (he co-founded Harman Kardon), expressed the point well in his memoir, Mind Your Own Business: "Writing is not the simple transfer of fully formed intellectual inventory from brain to paper… Writing is discovery. It is, as Dylan Thomas said, 'the blank page on which I read my mind.

Life is full of little surprises. Time travel is full of big ones.

One thing I know is that the inward way is not the way," he said. "That's a trap. Anything that gets you outside of yourself is good. Don't look inside for salvation. Go spend a little time alone in the wilderness.

the second time you see something is really the first time. You need to know how it ends before you can appreciate how beautifully it's put together from the beginning.

That's the great illusion of travel, of course, the notion that there's somewhere to get to. A place where you can finally say, Ah, I've arrived. (Of course there is no such place. There's only a succession of waitings until you go home.)

I tend to stumble through life as if lost in a deep forest with an out-of-date map that I can't figure out how to fold. The trees all look familiar, animals are making scary sounds in the bushes and the sandwich in my bag isn't what I ordered. No doubt I'm not alone in this.

If you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they already know what they are going to discover.105 That's pretty much the system we have now.

The one thing we can be confident of is that history is not over, and that wherever the most exciting new ideas of the next century come from, it will almost certainly be from someplace we don't expect.

Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening.

One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.

Adventure is not outside a man it is within.

Science has repeatedly revealed to us that we are not unique or special — except, guess what. We are.

These disturbances are the product of our human propensity to explore in teams, to develop new tools to expand our domain to places that are not part of our "natural" habitat.