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Quotes About Discovery

My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it. So now I do what pleases Jubal Harshaw.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
I haven't been in the slightest danger. Just lost. And now I'm found.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
Hice un descubrimiento muy importante en el campamento Currie: la felicidad consiste en dormir suficiente.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
At first I thought it was a fur cap; now I see it's alive. Castor pointed to the furry heap on the counter. It was slowly slithering toward the edge. The shopkeeper reached out and headed it back to the middle. That?
~ Robert A. Heinlein
Why? Why does anybody want to go anywhere? Why did the bear go round the mountain? To see what he could see! I've never seen the Rings. That's reason enough to go anywhere. The race has been doing it for all time. The dull ones stay home—and the bright ones stir around and try to see what trouble they can dig up. It's the human pattern. It doesn't need a reason, any more than a flat cat needs a reason to buzz. Why anything?
~ Robert A. Heinlein
Without Gay, without her ability to do a Drunkard's Walk, we could have searched that planet for a lifetime, and never found either colony.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
I see. Well—got everything you want?" "Yes," admitted Monroe-Alpha, "unless you should happen to have concealed, somewhere about your person, a hypersphere, a hypersurface, and some four-dimensional liquid, suitable for fine lubrication.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
I recall the day you swiped one of my cigars, and how sick it made you. Your mother and I carefully avoided noticing that you couldn't eat dinner that night and I've never mentioned it to you until now—boys have to try such things and discover for themselves that men's vices are not for them.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
When the field is clear, the reports all seen, When the lock sighs shut, when the lights wink green, When the check-off's done, when it's time to pray, When the captain nods, when she blasts away Hear the jets! Hear them snarl at your back When you're stretched on the rack; Feel your ribs clamp your chest, Feel your neck grind its rest. Feel the pain in your ship, Feel her strain in their grip. Feel her rise! Feel her drive! Straining steel, come alive, On her jets!
~ Robert A. Heinlein
a thousand reasoned opinions are never equal to one case of diving in and finding out.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
When the field is clear, the reports all seen, When the lock sighs shut, when the lights wink green, When the check-off's done, when it's time to pray, When the captain nods, when she blasts away Hear the jets! Hear them snarl at your back When you're stretched on the rack; Feel your ribs clamp your chest, Feel your neck grind its rest. Feel the pain in your ship, Feel her strain in their grip. Feel her rise! Feel her drive! Straining steel, come alive, On her iets!
~ Robert A. Heinlein
Her face lit up. "What's wrong with this little stand of trees?" "Mmm. Yes. Now.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
Well, we're on the Moon.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
Sharpie, I thought you liked Star Trek?" "I do. But I've seen five years of it and we've got our own Star Trek now.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
I had an unsettling feeling that I had been completely mistaken as to the very nature of the world I was in, as if every part of it was something wildly different from what it appeared to be - like discovering that your own mother isn't anyone you've ever seen before, but a stranger in a rubber mask.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
Carl Jung said that if you find the psychic wound in an individual or a people, there you also find their path to consciousness.
~ Robert A. Johnson
Stupidity is like bumping into a wall all the time. After a while you get tired of it and try to look the situation over and see if there's a doorway somewhere. I think most people eventually do look for the doorway and stop bumping into the wall
~ Robert Anton Wilson
That night he wrote in his diary, Challenge a remaining taboo. It was that simple. He had always wanted to understand genius, and now he had the formula. Freud, living in an age that prized its own seeming rationality, had found one of the remaining taboos and dared to think beyond it: he discovered infant sexuality and the unconscious, among other things. Galileo had gone beyond the taboo Thou shalt not question Aristotle. Every great discovery had been the breaking of a taboo.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
The tenth planet beyond Pluto, in this instance, will be discovered, or won't be discovered, when the space telescope goes into orbit in the near future. The existence of advanced life-forms beyond Earth may not be verified or refuted for a thousand years or longer — or it may be verified tomorrow, if the Space Brothers beloved in UFO lore suddenly land en masse — but at present it remains similarly indeterminate.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
Then I began to discover something about synchronicity and the imagination. Some of the most absurd things that we invented turned out to be true, and that really blew my mind.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson helped me realize that not all doors lead outward. The best ones, the ones that lead to the most exciting and uncharted places, are within. And no one in this world can withhold the key that unlocks those doors from us.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
5. James Joyce said he never met a boring human being. Try to explain this. Try to get into the Joycean head space, where everybody is a separate reality-island full of mystery and surprise. In other words, learn to observe.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
What is not-tuned-in by the best scientific instruments of 1986 may easily be tuned-in in 1987, for all we know.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
Do you have a first name, Mr. Spenser'?" Jill said. She had a soft girlish voice with just a hint of huskiness at the edges. I told her my first name.
~ Robert B. Parker