Quotes About Discovery

Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.

The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.

We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other.

A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity, so that new information is as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making itself apparent: I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island. It

Growth occurs when we discover how to remain authentically ourselves in the presence of potentially threatening things.

Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.

I was to look around me as though I had never been in this place before. And slowly, my travels began to bear fruit.

We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us.

Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don't yet know what to do with.

It is when we find points of connection to the foreign that we are able to grow.

Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way – towards a busy street or terminal – before they run out of their burrows.

Als we ons met de instelling van de reiziger [met ontvankelijkheid als voornaamste kenmerk] door onze eigen omgeving bewogen, zou deze wellicht niet minder interessant blijken dan de hoge bergpassen en de oerwouden vol vlinders in Humboldts Zuid-Amerika.

You ask whether the Orient is all I imagined it to be. Yes, it is—and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind.'   8.

If we read the new masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find in it those reflections of ours that we despised, joys and sorrows which we had repressed, a whole world of feeling we had scorned and whose value the book in which we discover them suddenly teaches us.

He (Proust) tells us, for instance, that there are two methods by which a person can acquire wisdom, painlessly via a teacher or painfully via life, and he proposes that the painful variety is far superior... We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us.

A momentus but until then overlooked fact was making its first appearance: that I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island.

what ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered were we simply to walk down a corridor and onto a craft that in a few hours would land us in a place of which we had no memories and where no one knew our name.

what effacement of the individual ego, a life in science now entailed.

Instead of bringing back sixteen thousand new plant species, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small, unfeted but life-enhancing thoughts.

Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate. EVER AFTER

We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.

We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake

Journeys are the midwives of thought.