Quotes About Discovery

So most of what we know now will be disproved or reassessed in the future. That is how science works, not through blind faith, but continual doubt.

To read, to seek, to know.

When you stay too long in one place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.

Every dead end and cul-de-sac helps us escape the maze. To know which path to take, it helps to take a few wrong ones.

Most people grow up gradually, over many years, but standing there in the still forest, Nikolas lost his childhood in a second. Nothing makes you grow up quicker than discovering your father is not the man you think he is.

I suppose, in the absence of universal certainties, we are our own best laboratory.

Maybe there was no perfect life for her, but somewhere, surely, there was a life worth living. And if she was to find a life truly worth living, she realised she would have to cast a wider net.

Familiarity could make you a stranger to yourself.

It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn't the place, but the perspective. And the most peculiar discovery Nora made was that, of all the extremely divergent variations of herself she had experienced, the most radical sense of change happened within the exact same life.

Happiness occurs when you for get who you're expected to be. And what you're expected to do. Happiness is an accident of self acceptance. It's the warm breeze you feel when you open the door to who you are.

Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.

An impossibility is just a possibility you don't understand yet.

That is how science works, not through blind faith, but continual doubt.

If you live long enough you realise that every proven fact is later disproved and then proven again.

The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that – and we shall – there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is.

Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself. But each map was incomplete, and I would only locate the treasure if I read all the books, and so the process of finding my best self was an endless quest. And books themselves seemed to me to reflect this idea. Which is why the plot of every book ever can be boiled down to 'someone is looking for something'.

A book is a map .... There will be times in your life when you will feel lost and confused. The way back to yourself is through reading. There is not a problem in existence that has not been eased, somewhere and at some time, by a book. ... The answers have all been written. And the more you read, the more you will know how to find your way through those difficult times.

It is so nice to be somewhere I don't know. To be somewhere new, when the world has felt so stale and familiar.

I am saying that the thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory.

You will never live if you're looking for the meaning of life.

The more you research the science of depression, the more you realise it is still more characterised by what we don't know than what we do. It is 90 per cent mystery.

Nora stared at the books around her. 'So, are you saying I only have pawns to play with?' 'I am saying that the thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory. You have to keep going.

in the proud history of geographic discovery. We had found paradise. And then we had set it on fire.

Cada libro que se ha escrito es el producto de una mente humana en un estado en particular. Si juntas todos los libros, tienes la suma final de la humanidad. Cada vez que leía un buen libro sentía que estaba leyendo una especie de mapa, un mapa del tesoro, y el tesoro al que me dirigían era en verdad yo mismo.