Quotes About Discovery

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore.

Discard every self-seeking motive as soon as it is seen, and you need not search for truth; truth will find you.

Even in earliest youth my fondest desire was to understand Nature, and thus to come closer to the truth; a truth that I was unable to discover either at school or in church.

They will set aside what they have believed about the world, divesting themselves of all preconceptions, all judgments.... They will do it, then they will send their minds out to seek the truth.

nothing is ever what you imagine, is it?

The Arcade, and now Peabody's, combined to tell me that there was life in objects, in books. It was all about having eyes to see the true meaning of things. As Pike proved daily, books held a kind of magic, an apparent as well as a hidden value.

A book was like a drawer: one opened it and notions flew out.

Poetry stumbled upon never seems accidental.

My progress seemed like a journey through the Spessart, where at every step some new goblin or monster starts from the ground or steps from behind a tree.

The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know.

But I can only pray ardently that Fortune walks with you, that you discover hitherto unimagined strength in yourself and encounter unexpected friends along this perilous path that you must now tread.

He felt like a pilgrim standing on the shores of Lake Sahara, having walked barefoot over hundreds of miles, yet all the hardships forgotten, filled with only wonder and reverence at the marvel of it all.

And to all of the challenges and rewards of my new life.

And Tomlinson found this in the Times right before I left to come here." Windham

And suddenly she resembled not so much a bland dish of pudding as the surface of a well-known, yet never explored lake, and he, standing on the banks, had just seen a movement underwater, an enigmatic shadow that disappeared so quickly he wasn't sure he hadn't imagined the whole thing.

I cannot believe you are who you are," he said, still flabbergasted. "I know she's admitted it and everything adds up. But I cannot believe it. I cannot believe I was right and your family really does go back to the Battle of Hastings." "Wrong." She was laughing and crying at once. "And I'm shocked that you don't know better—we are older than that; we were already earls under Edward the Confessor.

The philosopher Heinrich von Kleist calls this "the gradual completion of thoughts while speaking." Von Kleist quotes the French proverb that "appetite comes from eating" and observes that it is equally the case that "ideas come from speaking." The best thoughts, in his view, can be almost unintelligible as they emerge; what matters most is risky, thrilling conversation as a crucible for discovery.

Discovering an inner history requires listening – and often not to the first story told.

Anthropologist Victor Turner writes that we are most free to explore identity in places outside of our normal routines, places that are in some way "betwixt and between." Turner calls them liminal, from the Latin word for "threshold.

He experiences a connection where knowledge does not interfere with wonder.

do you think you can really run away from home, when you don't know where home is anymore?

Nah," Tommy said. "There's nothing up there

I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.

Civilization is perhaps nothing but a process of finding out what you cannot have.