Top 100 Great Discovery Quotes
#1. [In natural history,] great discovery often requires a map to a hidden mine filled with gems then easily gathered by conventional tools, not a shiny new space-age machine for penetrating previously inaccessible worlds.
Stephen Jay Gould
#2. The great discovery of the nineteenth century, that we are of one blood with the lower animals, has created new ethical obligations which have not yet penetrated the public conscience. The clerical profession has been lamentably remiss in preaching this obvious duty.
William Ralph Inge
#3. Dr. Stockmann. I have already told you that what I want to speak about
is the great discovery I have made lately
the discovery that all the
sources of our moral life are poisoned and that the hole fabric of our
civic community is founded on the pestiferous soil of falsehood.
Henrik Ibsen
#4. There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
Thomas Carlyle
#5. When you get to know a lot of people, you make a great discovery. You find that no one group has a monopoly on looks, brains, goodness or anything else. It takes all the people - black and white, Catholic, Jewish and Protestant, recent immigrants and Mayflower descendants - to make up America.
Judy Garland
#6. No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.
Isaac Newton
#7. God bless the man who first invented sleep! So Sancho Panza said and so say I; And bless him, also, that he didn't keep His great discovery to himself, nor try To make it, as the lucky fellow might A close monopoly by patent-right.
John Godfrey Saxe
#8. Often, in great discovery the most important thing is that a certain question is found.
Max Wertheimer
#9. Eye was a great discovery. He is one of the great vocalists of all time.
John Zorn
#10. His [Faraday's] third great discovery is the Magnetization of Light, which I should liken to the Weisshorn among mountains-high, beautiful, and alone.
John Tyndall
#11. Two men, on opposite sides of the world, had made the same great discovery at the same time.
David Quammen
#12. No man ever made a great discovery without the exercise of the imagination.
George Henry Lewes
#13. A great discovery is a fact whose appearance in science gives rise to shining ideas, whose light dispels many obscurities and shows us new paths.
Claude Bernard
#14. I swim in a shaft of light, upside down, and I can see myself clearly, through and through, from every angle. Perhaps I stand on the brink of a great discovery.
Jamaica Kincaid
#15. Behind great discovery three values are the rudiments; inspiration , motivation and determination. To be a succesful general , you must be inspired, motivated and determined .
Osunsakin Adewale
#16. If you can find any other view of the world which agrees over the entire range where things have already been observed, but disagrees somewhere else, you have made a great discovery.
Richard P. Feynman
#17. We start out as pretty creative beings ... Children let their imaginations take them to place they've never seen and do things that seem impossible. We encourage it as fun and playtime, but we should celebrate it as the potential for great discovery and accomplishment.
Harvey MacKay
#18. We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universalthat error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#19. This is the great adventure and the great discovery. No one can do it for us. Until we have reached the top of the mountain we cannot see in full glory the view that lies beyond; but glimpses of light illumine our path to the mountain.
Juan Mascaro
#20. In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.
Will Durant
#21. Every great discovery I ever made, I gambled that the truth was there, and then I acted in faith until I could prove its existence.
Arthur H. Compton
#22. The discovery of her life was that she herself didn't actually need money, apart from a little cash for those relationships with taxi drivers and officials of the Great Western Railway which can only be expressed financially.
Elizabeth Ironside
#23. There is greatness in everyone.
Look within yourself and discover your greatness.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#24. Every good laboratory consists of first rate men working in great harmony to insure the progress of science; but down at the end of the hall is an unsociable, wrong-headed fellow working on unprofitable lines, and in his hands lies the hope of discovery.
Ernest Rutherford
#25. Great inventors and discoverers seem to have made their discoveries and inventions as it were by the way, in the course of their everyday life.
Elizabeth Charles
#26. In the future, as in the past, the great ideas [of mathematics] must be simplifying ideas, the creator must always be one who clarifies, for himself, and for others, the most complicated issues of formulas and concepts.
Andre Weil
#27. I appear as a skeptic, who believes that doubt is the great engine, the great fuel of all inquiry, all discovery and all innovation.
Christopher Hitchens
#28. [Government's] great contribution to human wisdom ... is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.
H.L. Mencken
#29. The Hubble Law is one of the great discoveries in science; it is one of the main supports of the scientific story of Genesis.
Robert Jastrow
#30. A great curse has fallen upon modern life with the discovery of the vastness of the word Education.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#31. The imagination is a healthy thing, and a great many scientific discoveries could not have been made without it, but it need to be harnessed to some serious object if it is to come to anything.
Diane Setterfield
#32. Great love is always a discovery, a revelation, a wonderful surprise, a falling into "something" much bigger and deeper that is literally beyond us and larger than us.
Richard Rohr
#34. Waking up was sheer delight for him: he always showed a naive and simple amazement at the discovery that he was back on earth; he was sincerely pleased. She, on the other hand, awoke with great reluctance, with a desire to stave off the day by keeping her eyes closed.
Milan Kundera
#35. Push the door open the discovery could be, great that when the rain is long gone the sun might shine
Edward Malatji
#36. But if you believe that adults can 'make' children learn well - in the absence of or in defiance of a child's inner sense of confident engagement with the power of discovery and mastery - then, in my view, you are placing that child at great risk of failure as a learner.
Kirsten Olson
#37. The better educated we are and the more acquired information we have, the better prepared shall we find our minds for making great and fruitful discoveries.
Claude Bernard
#38. The mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap
Albert Einstein
#39. When I started writing seriously, I made the major discovery of my life - that I am right and everybody else is wrong if they disagree with me. What a great thing to learn: Don't listen to anyone else, and always go your own way.
Ray Bradbury
#40. The discovery that the universe was expanding was one of the great intellectual revolutions of the twentieth century.
Stephen Hawking
#41. No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as a language.
Benjamin Disraeli
#42. For sometime now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true that we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least?
Rainer Maria Rilke
#43. A great unification is now taking place between science and spirituality. The most advanced discoveries of modern science are rising to reaffirm the timeless wisdom of the great religious and spiritual traditions of every culture.
John Hagelin
#44. By mutual confidence and mutual aid - great deeds are done, and great discoveries made
Homer
#45. You will surely succeed in life with great passion and desire for self-study.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#46. But biology and computer science - life and computation - are related. I am confident that at their interface great discoveries await those who seek them.
Leonard Adleman
#47. Science is the most exciting and sustained enterprise of discovery in the history of our species. It is the great adventure of our time. We live today in an era of discovery that far outshadows the discoveries of the New World five hundred years ago.
Michael Crichton
#48. If a government is to do great new things, it will need more support. If a government is to change the world, it will need mass support. This is one of the discoveries of modern government.
Bernard Crick
#49. I'm not looking to step in and make 'big, bold changes' - I think reddit is great, and the team has a lot of good features already in the pipeline to improve functionality for users and mods, help with subreddit discovery, improve the API, and help bring reddit to more people.
Yishan Wong
#50. One good thing about television is that you have a lot of people with money who have real good cameras going around to all these countries. You haven't been there? Great. Turn on The History Channel or The Discovery Channel. So, we're lucky in that way.
Grace Slick
#51. Peer reviewers go for orthodoxy ... Many of the great 19th-century discoveries were made by men who had independent wealth-Charles Darwin is the prototype. They trusted themselves.
James Black
#52. Great discoveries are made accidentally less often than the populace likes to think.
(Commenting on how an accident led to the discovery of X-rays)
William Cecil Dampier
#53. The discovery there is no god is a great relief, because if there were, it would be like living in a celestial North Korea if there was one. You would never be able to escape.
Christopher Hitchens
#54. The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.
Oprah Winfrey
#55. One curious result of this inertia, which deserves to rank among the fundamental 'laws' of nature, is that when a discovery has finally won tardy recognition it is usually found to have been anticipated, often with cogent reasons and in great detail.
F. C. S. Schiller
#56. One of yoga's great gifts to making is the discovery of the link that exists between energy, breath, and mind. As you change one, you also change the other two. If you excite one, the other two become excited and, conversely, if you calm one, the other two respond by becoming calm also.
John Novak
#57. Long before haunted houses existed, haunted woods circled the globe. Homer knew it. The Brothers Grimm knew it. In legend, all the great mythic quests of self-discovery begin with the hero entering a dark wood. Some journeys also end there.
Robert Dunbar
#58. His teaching became a turning point in chess history: it was from Steinitz that the era of modern chess began. The contribution of the first world champion to its development is comparable with the great scientific discoveries of the 19th century.
Garry Kasparov
#59. Gold and iron at the present day, as in ancient times, are the rulers of the world; and the great events in the world of mineral art are not the discovery of new substances, but of new and rich localities of old ones.
William Whewell
#60. First doubt, then inquire, then discover. This has been the process with all our great thinkers.
Henry Thomas Buckle
#61. The search for knowledge and the discovery of a great weapon are virtually one and the same. War is the father of everything.
Paul Hoffman
#62. Anyone who had died young after a happy childhood had won a great victory, since he would be forever spared the discovery of what sort of place the world really is. Others must look forward to death by defeat - their bodies gone, their world destroyed.
Carlos Baker
#63. Cross-examination is beyond any doubt the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth ... Cross-examination, not trial by jury, is the great and permanent contribution of the Anglo-American system of law to improved methods of trial-procedure.
John Henry Wigmore
#64. A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries.
Peter Medawar
#65. I'm 100% proud of the TV work I achieved. The work I did on shows on insects and Great White sharks ... stuff that's in school curriculums in England. Now they are showing up on Discovery Channel.
John Lydon
#66. The great Christian revolutions came not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when someone takes radically something that was always there.
H. Richard Niebuhr
#67. Linear programming can be viewed as part of a great revolutionary development which has given mankind the ability to state general goals and to lay out a path of detailed decisions to take in order to "best" achieve its goals when faced with practical situations of great complexity.
George Dantzig
#68. The 19th century was the great period of engineering, thanks to the railways, thanks to lots of discoveries in metallurgy.
Joe Harris
#69. The discovery of the unconscious is a great spiritual undertaking.
Richard Tarnas
#70. It feels great to discover a planet, just like any discovery in science, except that it has more of the feel of exploration - you can go back and look at it. However, I can never visit.
Dimitar Sasselov
#71. It is one of Miss Manners's great discoveries that one needn't contradict others in order to set them straight.
Judith Martin
#72. There's nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope.
Woody Allen
#74. All great and famous people understand that the chief priority in their life is to discover oneself, ones calling and to devote one's life to its fulfilment
Sunday Adelaja
#75. What is wrong is not the great discoveries of science - information is always better than ignorance, no matter what information or what ignorance. What is wrong is the belief behind the information, the belief that information will change the world. It won't.
Archibald MacLeish
#76. For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinement, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought.Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of illusion and discovery.
Louise Erdrich
#77. A reporter asked Barth what was the single most important theological discovery he'd made. After stopping to consider his answer carefully, Barth said, "Jesus loves me. This I know, for the Bible tells me so." Indeed, we can never outgrow that one great, majestic, and simple transforming truth.
Mark Driscoll
#78. Although the vast country which we have been describing was inhabited by many indigenous tribes, it may justly be said at the time of its discovery by Europeans to have formed one great desert. The Indians occupied without possessing it.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#79. Great inventions are never, and great discoveries are seldom, the work of any one mind. Every great invention is really an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step of a progression. It is not usually a creation, but a growth, as truly so as is the growth of the trees in the forest.
Robert Henry Thurston
#80. Milan, for me, is a city of discovery. You can find some amazing gardens behind some great houses; I also love finding beautiful galleries and incredible shops, but you have to explore. And the food is amazing.
Francisco Costa
#81. The great revelation of the quantum theory was that features of discreteness were discovered in the Book of Nature, in a context in which anything other than continuity seemed to be absurd according to the views held until then.
Erwin Schrodinger
#82. I would hope that people, no matter what age, would find something to identify with in my books, pick one up and experience a personal sense of discovery. That's great. But for them, not for me.
Shel Silverstein
#83. The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. The glory of great men should always be measured by the means they have used to acpuire it.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#84. Art is a great means of self-discovery. One of the things that appealed to me in the beginning was that it was a great way to get girlfriends.
Malcolm Morley
#85. Scientists are human - they're as biased as any other group. But they do have one great advantage in that science is a self-correcting process.
Cyril Ponnamperuma
#86. The so-called 'discoveries' of the Impressionists could not have been unknown to the old masters; and if they made no use of them, it was because all great artists have renounced the use of effects. And in simplifying nature, they made it all the greater.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#87. Through every rift of discovery some seeming anomaly drops out of the darkness, and falls, as a golden link into the great chain of order.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#88. Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#89. People think that if you are a scientist you have to give up that joy of discovery, that passion, that sense of the great romance of life. I say that's completely opposite of the truth.
Ann Druyan
#90. This whole universe, with all its vastness, grandeur and beauty, is nothing but sheer imagination. In spite of so many discoveries, researches and scientific knowledge, the creation remains a great unsolved riddle.
Meher Baba
#91. For a justice of this ultimate tribunal [the U.S. Supreme Court], the opportunity for self-discovery and the occasion for self-revelation is great.
Abe Fortas
#93. Majorian presents the welcome discovery of a great and heroic character, such as sometimes arise, in a degenerate age, to vindicate the honor of the human species.
Edward Gibbon
#94. Look, I'm going to take full advantage of this situation just because I love working with great filmmakers. But I've been around for a while, and I'm not going to play into the hype that I'm some great, you know, discovery.
Josh Brolin
#95. Noting all these things with the great delight which learning gives, we cannot but be stirred by these discoveries when we reflect upon the influence of them one by one.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
#96. We have always tried to be guided by the basic idea that, in the discovery of knowledge, there is great entertainment - as, conversely, in all good entertainment, there is always some grain of wisdom, humanity, or enlightenment to be gained.
Walt Disney Company
#97. He was not only, I soon discovered, a water drinker, but a strict vegetarian, to which, perhaps, he owed a great deal of the almost preternatural clearness, volubility, and sensitiveness of mind.
Charles Kingsley
#98. Columbus real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer.
Bill Bryson
#99. The discovery of the Square was a great event to the primitive mystics of the Nile. Very early it became an emblem of truth, justice, and righteousness, and it remains to this day through unaccountable ages have passed.
Joseph Fort Newton
#100. People who have read a good deal rarely make great discoveries. I do not say this in excuse of laziness, but because invention presupposes an extensive independent contemplation of things.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
