Quotes About Discovery

Without bravery, they would never know the world as richly as it longs to be known.

strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them. The hunt to uncover those jewels—that's creative living. The courage to go on that hunt in the first place—that's what separates a mundane existence from a more enchanted one. The often surprising results of that hunt—that's what I call Big Magic.

Any place that one could not leave was not large—particularly if one was a naturalist!

We are all walking repositories of hidden treasures.

She had envisaged them traveling to Boston together, or perhaps even beyond--as far away as the Alps, climbing over boulders to hunt for pasqueflowers and rock-jasmine. He would say to her, What do you make of this specimen? and she would say, It is fine and rare.

I don't know what I think until I write about it (Joan Didion).

The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.

Without it, you will never push yourself out of the suffocating insulation of personal safety and into the frontiers of the beautiful and the unexpected.

Elizabeth Gilbert

The English travel writer Isabel Bird, famous for her cool and detached prose, seemed scarcely able to keep from exclaiming hubba-hubba as she checked out the rugged men she kept encountering on her trip to America in the 1850s:

Sometimes it takes a very long while to figure things out.

But a lot of people don't know exactly what their passion is, or they may have multiple passions, or they may be going through a midlife change of passion—all of which can leave them feeling confused and blocked and insecure.

move, etc., etc., etc.).

Later in life he reported that he had found his fame boring—not because it was immoral or corrupting, but simply because it was exactly the same thing every day. He was looking for something richer, more textured, more varied. So he dropped out.

The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them. The hunt to uncover those jewels—that's creative living. The

Most of all, I keep working because I trust that creativity is always trying to find me, even when I have lost sight of it.

Pay heed: the artichoke is a shy vegetable. She covers herself in spine-tipped leaves that must be carefully peeled away, and underneath shields her treasure with a barricade o' soft needles. They must be tenderly, but firmly, scraped aside. Ye must be bold, for if yer not, she'll never reveal her soft heart.

His wide brow, his Roman nose, those too-cold eyes, and the lips that in another life- another, better world- would still have been beautiful. This man was her husband. He was intense and intelligent, arrogant and vulnerable, dark and strange. The more she found out about him, the more she thought that perhaps she might fall in love with him, Raphael de Chartres, the Duke of Dyemore. What was more, he was hers . And in that she would not fail.

As if she'd merely sleepwalked through everything else in her life prior to his arrival.

Have you looked at my books? Glanced at my titles? Fondled my spines?

For the first time, I had been struck by the excitement of the traveler who looks history in her subtle face.

And I grant you that anyone who pokes around in history long enough may well go mad.

I flipped through the rest of the pages—when you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.

No I like a puzzle, as you know. So does every scholar worth his salt. It's the reward of the business, to look history in the eye and say, 'I know who you are. You can't fool me.