Quotes About Discovery

Mortality is like the cold. It cannot be altered by human conceit or solidarity, and at the end you will be on your knees, in shock and amazement, and then you'll have only one sword, one shield, one great thing to carry you through. Alessandro waited to hear what that was, but his father would not say. If you don't discover it yourself, it will be nothing more than an exhortation from me.

I made a boy's mistake, common enough, of thinking that real life was knowing many things and many people, living dangerously in faraway places, crossing the sea, or starting a power company on the Columbia River, a steamship line in Bolivia.

Fear, delight, and being twenty were made for each other:

All great discoveries," the elder Marratta had once said, "are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents." At

A friend once told me that I find my stories because I never learned to drive. It's true. I take the bus. I walk around. By being out there—not the driver of my story but the literal and figurative rider—I have the opportunity to see things that I would never otherwise see. I

Jamming was our ally. It made people curious about what we were hiding.

the four great inventions—paper, compass, gunpowder, and printing

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and to be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. —MARCEL PROUST

there are countless stories of people whose lives truly find their meaning after events force them to give up careers that they have been devoted to.

I discovered that living is the original art.

As soon as we are born, we are part of an endless search that really goes nowhere.

Of course, there will always be times that we need to find our very precise way. But more often than not, our image of a destination is only a starting point that we cling to needlessly. When we can free up our sense of needing to arrive in a certain place, we lessen the weight of being lost. And once beneath arriving and beneath our fear of failing to arrive, the real journey begins.

If counseling is a process of discovery and recovery, then grace is essential to help clients experience enough safety to explore the hidden places of their lives.

An unread book is a world unexplored

That great moment when a plot twist appears in your story, one you never thought of, one coming from some hidden place in your mind.

Given the state of airlines and airports these days, I travel extensively by opening a book.

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

When, over the following months, Minta Randall found that Eustace apparently reciprocated her profoundest and most secret feelings, she thought she had never lived before, or knew what life could hold, or what absolute power one heart could exert upon another. She perceived no trace, fossil, or echo of this wild sensation anywhere around her, and concluded that she and Eustace had invented it together, which would be, she thought, just like them.

explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can't learn why.

You quit your house and country, quit your ship, and quit your companions in the tent, saying, "I am just going outside and may be some time." The light on the far side of the blizzard lures you. You walk, and one day you enter the spread heart of silence, where lands dissolve and seas become vapor and ices sublime under unknown stars. This is the end of the Via Negativa, the lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins.