Discoverers Quotes & Sayings

At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily. — Flannery O'Connor

He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams. — Peter S. Beagle

People have laughed at all great inventors and discoverers. — John Sladek

I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen. — Henry David Thoreau

Pasteur said, like all great discoverers, he knew something about accidental discoveries. The best way to get maximal exposure is to keep researching. Collect opportunities-- — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Guess what? Science like gravity doesn't care what the sex of the discoverers is ... — Steve Merrick

Even if we never reach the stars by our own efforts, in the millions of years that lie ahead it is almost certain that the stars will come to us. Isolationism is neither a practical policy on the national or cosmic scale. And when the first contact with the outer universe is made, one would like to think that Mankind played an active and not merely a passive role-that we were the discoverers, not the discovered. — Arthur C. Clarke

We do not create the work. I believe we, in fact, are discoverers. — Glenn Murcutt

We are voyagers, discoverers
of the not-known,
the unrecorded;
we have no map;
possibly we will reach haven,
heaven. — H.D.

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

As a species, we've always been discoverers and adventurers, and space and the deep ocean are some of the last frontiers. — Paul Allen

Let us not fool ourselves into thinking we went to the Moon because we are pioneers, or discoverers, or adventurers. We went to the Moon because it was the militaristically expedient thing to do. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

We have scholars galore, and kings and emperors, and statesmen and military leaders, and artists in profusion, and inventors, discoverers, explorers - but where are the great lovers? After a moment's reflection one is back to Abelard and Heloise, or Anthony and Cleopatra, or the story of the Taj Mahal. So much of it is fictive, expanded and glorified by the poverty-stricken lovers whose prayers are answered only by myth and legend. — Henry Miller

A number of scientists with greatly different backgrounds can come up with completely different assessments. The discussions or controversies are endless. Once a year, we try to bring the most important discoverers together to exchange their experiences and knowledge. — Richard Leakey

Those without the gate frequently question the wisdom and right of the occultist to guard his knowledge by the imposition of oaths of secrecy. We are so accustomed to see the scientist give his beneficent discoveries freely to all mankind that we feel that humanity is wronged and defrauded if any knowledge be kept secret by its discoverers and not at once made available for all who desire to share in it.
The knowledge is reserved in order that humanity may be protected from its abuse at the hands of the unscrupulous. — Dion Fortune

Those who are in the orbit, but nonetheless on the edges, can often be the real discoverers. It was why at times, the journalist, the historian and even the novelist paints the fullest picture of an era — Bob Woodward

One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers ... — Heinrich Hertz

The weapons laboratory of Los Alamos stands as a reminder that our very power as pattern finders can work against us, that it is possible to discern enough of the universe's underlying order to tap energy so powerful that it can destroy its discoverers or slowly poison them with its waste. — George Johnson

The heroes and discoverers have found true more than was previously believed, only when they were expecting and dreaming of something more than their contemporaries dreamed of, or even themselves discovered, that is, when they were in a frame of mind fitted to behold the truth. Referred to the world's standard, they are always insane. Even savages have indirectly surmised as much. — Henry David Thoreau

Knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy, dignified life. Humanity has every reason to place proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth. — Albert Einstein

The "discovery" of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the "discovery" of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived. — Barbara Ehrenreich

The discovery of DMT in the human body stimulated much less fanfare than did that of endorphins. Anti-psychedelic-drug sentiment sweeping the USA at the time actually turned researchers against studying endogenous DMT. The discoverers of endorphins, in contrast, won Nobel Prizes ... — Rick Strassman

It is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverers. — John Reader

What are you thinking got discovering?"
Moomintroll cleared his throat and felt very proud. "Oh, everything," he said. "Stars, for example!"
Snufkin was deeply impressed.
"Stars!" he exclaimed. "Then I must come with you. Stars are my favorite things. I always lie and look at them before I go to sleep, and wonder who is on them and how one could get there. The sky looks so friendly with all those little eyes twinkling in it. — Tove Jansson

Compassionate people are geniuses in the art of living, more necessary to the dignity, security, and joy of humanity than the discoverers of knowledge. — Albert Einstein

There is an unbridgeable chasm between the book that traditions had declared a classic and the book (the same book) that we have made ours through instinct, emotion and understanding: suffered through it, rejoiced in it, translated it into our experience and (notwithstanding the layers of readings with which a book come into our hands) essentially become its first discoverers, an experience as astonishing and unexpected. — Alberto Manguel

The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We, however, want to become those we are
human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. To that end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be able to be creators in this sense
while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been based on ignorance of physics or were constructed so as to contradict it. Therefore: long live physics! And even more so that which compels us to turn to physics
our honesty! — Friedrich Nietzsche

The goal of discoverers is not to outdistance their peers, but to transcend themselves. — Robert Grudin

Travelers are always discoverers, especially those who travel by air. There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

This may be why Einstein once said; "Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth. What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the enquiring and constructive mind." The fact is that we need the insights of the mystic every bit as much as we need the insights of the scientist. Mankind is diminished when either is missing. — Michael Crichton

The English too, were turning their eyes to the South. In 1769, there was to be a transit of the planet Venus across the disc of the sun, a rare event which astronomers wanted to observe. The newly discovered island of Tahiti was judged the perfect site. The Royal Society in London asked the Royal Navy to organize the expedition. The Navy obliged. This was to have profound and unlooked-for consequences. It led to the virtual monopolization by naval officers of British Polar exploration until the first decade of this century. The voyage inspired by the transit of Venus was commanded by a man of quiet genius, James Cook, one of the greatest of discoverers. — Roland Huntford

America had many other discoverers besides Columbus, but he seems to have made more satisfactory arrangements with the historians than any of the others. — Bill Nye

We measure our presence in generations; we cannot dig down ten thousand years and find our bones. Our arrival is scribed upon the line of history; it does not drift upon the winds of story, or float upon the shrouds of myth. We are still explorers and discoverers, seeking meaning through movement and examination. But we are coming to a time of listening. Our sweat and breath are now upon this land. Voices rise up, and we begin to hear the echoes in the stones. — Kent Nerburn

If we treasure our own experience and regard it as real, we must also treasure other people's experience. Reality is no less precious if it presents itself to someone else. All are discoverers, and if we disenfranchise any, all suffer. — John Polanyi

When we consider the magnitude and extent of his discoveries and their influence on the progress of science and of industry, there is no honour too great to pay to the memory of Faraday, one of the greatest scientific discoverers of all time. — Ernest Rutherford

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered. — Jean Piaget

Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the 'raw material' of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science. — Horace Mann

To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves - unwittingly - to justify what was done. — Howard Zinn

And the days began to walk. And they, the days, made us. And thus we were born, the children of the days, the discoverers, life's searchers. - GENESIS, according to the Mayas — Eduardo Galeano

In Science, it is when we take some interest in the great discoverers and their lives that it becomes endurable, and only when we begin to trace the development of ideas that it becomes fascinating. — James Clerk Maxwell

And now good morrow to our waking souls, Which watch not one another out of fear; For love, all love of other sights controls, And makes one little room, an everywhere. Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown, Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one. — John Donne

The star we're looking for isn't so very friendly," said Moomintroll. "Quite the contrary, in fact."
"What did you say?" said Sniff.
Moomintroll went a bit red. "I mean
stars in general," he said, "big and small, friendly and unfriendly, and so on."
"Can they be unfriendly?" asked Snufkin.
"Yes
ones with tails," answered Moomintroll. "Comets."
At last it dawned on Sniff. "You're hiding something from me!" he said accusingly. "That pattern we saw everywhere, and you said it didn't mean anything!"
"You're too small to be told everything," answered Moomintroll.
"Too small!" screamed Sniff. "I must say it's a fine thing to take me on an expedition of discovery and not tell me what I'm supposed to be discovering! — Tove Jansson

Creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story- a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination. — Daniel J. Boorstin

It is my purpose also to give the names and number and times of those who through love of innovation have run into the greatest errors, and, proclaiming themselves discoverers of knowledge falsely so-called [1 Timothy 6:20] have like fierce wolves unmercifully devastated the flock of Christ. — Eusebius

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land when they can see nothing but sea. — Francis Bacon

Prophets, mystics, poets, scientific discoverers are men whose lives are dominated by a vision; they are essentially solitary men ... whose thoughts and emotions are not subject to the dominion of the herd. — Bertrand Russell