Quotes About Discovery

Modern philosophers who aspire to rise above the sordid economic reality of the world would do well to recall that this trade made possible the cross-fertilisation of ideas that led to great discoveries.

Gutenberg made printed books affordable, which kicked off an increase in literacy, which created a market for spectacles, which led to work on lenses that in turn resulted in the invention of microscopes and telescopes, which unleashed the discovery that the earth went round the sun.

Thanks largely to Greenblatt's marvellous book The Swerve, I have only recently come to know Lucretius, and to appreciate the extent to which I am, and always have been without knowing it, a Lucretian/Epicurean.

In the search for a strong and permanent glue, Spencer Silver at 3M in Minneapolis found a weak and temporary adhesive instead. This was in 1968. Nobody could think of a use for it, until five years later a colleague named Art Fry remembered it when irritated by his place-markers falling out of a hymn-book while singing in a church choir. He went back to Silver and asked to apply the glue to small sheets of paper. The only paper lying around was bright yellow. The Post-it note was born.

A month after the Watson-Crick structure was published, Britain crowned a new queen and a British expedition conquered Mount Everest on the same day. Apart from a small piece in the News Chronicle, the double helix did not make the newspapers. Today most scientists consider it the most momentous discovery of the century, if not the millennium.

So growth will resume – unless prevented by the wrong policies. Somebody, somewhere, is still tweaking a piece of software, testing a new material, or transferring a gene that will make your and my life easier in the future.

Science is like a hungry furnace that must feed from the the forest of ignorance that surrounds us.

But the library - especially one so vast - is no mere cabinet of curiosities; it's a world, complete and uncompleteable, and it is filled with secrets.

mmmm, space stuff

It is especially so when, on some basic, primal level, you realize that the new world in front of you is somehow the place you were meant to be all along. For a little while, all you can do is gape in wonder. And then, if you are very brave, or very foolish, you take your first step. And at some point you realize---maybe then, maybe later---that the person who stepped through the doorway isn't the same person who emerged on the other side.

Keep digging and you'll always discover a new low.

We'll just have to find more flowers in the spring. That's when they bloom, tra la.

Readers, professional or casual, are alert to passages in a book that illuminate what was previously shadowy and formless.

Reading, my earliest refuge in the unknown world, made me want to venture into it.

Like a lot of other bashful introverts, I discovered that I like teaching a lot because it's like acting. When I stepped into the classroom, I stepped into a role, one that allowed me to forget myself.

Constant reading pulled me away from the world of my childhood, the world of my parents.

The child who gets lost in a book can emerge from the experience a changeling.

The real magic rocks are the friends we make along the way.

No moose, Stevie said. The moose is a lie.

The locker at the end of her bed had no lock, and one of the hinges was busted. She opened it up. There was a thing in it. The thing might have been a sandwich at some point, or an animal, or a human hand...but what it was now was fuzzy and putrid. A minute later, Ginny was down the stairs, out the door, and gone.

She didn't even notice right away that a small animal had come out from behind a nearby car and was slowly making its way toward the trash can she was standing near. She flipped through some old files in her mind, trying to come up with what this thing might be, and after a few seconds decided that--impossible as it seemed--it was a fox.

I dumped out the bag and found what had been inside was a bunched-up police uniform, complete with the vest. Where did you get this? Boo asked. It's Callum's, he said. What's he wearing? At the moment, not much of anything. Put it on. I noticed Book perk up a bit at this piece of information.

I love Ginny's expedition!

I had always liked him, but it never occurred to me to like him, like him.