Discovery Quotes

“What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Blackness. Nothingness. It was in the shape of a giant, hazy shadow, enveloping me, swallowing me, and digesting me into the unknown. It was my biggest fear and my ultimate fate.”
― Misty Mount, The Shadow Girl

“Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.”
― Wally Lamb, The Hour I First Believed

“Beauty is not a warrant for wellbeing and so does happiness not hinge on social success, but is only tangible via intricate, meandering discovery journeys in the mind. (" Absence of beauty was like hell ")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place. The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories. Sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which she had thought must be rather stupid. She had no intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider awake every day which passed at Misselthwaite.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“When I moved my hands down away from the window I caught sight of my reflection in the glass, bright against the black morning beyond. I couldn’t contain the audible gasp that sounded in my throat. I had expected to see the slightly translucent representation of my face mirrored on the pane, but instead I saw an ivory haze where my features should have been.”
― Misty Mount, The Shadow Girl

“Happiness is not an unexpected jackpot nor a monolithic cluster but a forbearing casting and a daily discovery process. (" Why has shé got stars in the sky? ")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“When I realized what the drawing was depicting, I thought I would feel horror-stricken and petrified, but a strange calm had settled over me. I said, “This blackness was in my nightmare. It was coming for me to take me away... and I was running, trying to escape.”
― Misty Mount, The Shadow Girl

“During the Depression of the 1930s everyone suffered, even the rich. It was hard times for all and people helped each other if they could. Americans coming through that together meant something. Now they were being asked to struggle again. But because so many servicemen were killed at Pearl Harbor, Americans had a cause that they all shared – fight the Fascists and keep the threat and the war from coming home. Yet, now the grim reality, the depths of the sacrifices, and the grief of their losses was devastating.”
― A.G. Russo, O'SHAUGHNESSY INVESTIGATIONS, INC.: The Cases Nobody Wanted

“Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”
― Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

“The requirement for anyone running for elected office to have held a position of public service, such as fireman, school teacher, librarian, scout leader, or policeman was never actually passed into law.
Still the range of day jobs that some of our Congress people now hold are pretty amazing.
Somehow these days a background as a lawyer is a big minus.”
― Nancy Omeara, The Most Popular President Who Ever Lived [So Far]

“It was the general opinion of ancient nations, that the divinity alone was adequate to the important office of giving laws to men... and modern nations, in the consecrations of kings, and in several superstitious chimeras of divine rights in princes and nobles, are nearly unanimous in preserving remnants of it... Is the jealousy of power, and the envy of superiority, so strong in all men, that no considerations of public or private utility are sufficient to engage their submission to rules for their own happiness? Or is the disposition to imposture so prevalent in men of experience, that their private views of ambition and avarice can be accomplished only by artifice? —… There is nothing in which mankind have been more unanimous; yet nothing can be inferred from it more than this, that the multitude have always been credulous, and the few artful. The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature: and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven, any more than those at work upon ships or houses, or labouring in merchandize or agriculture: it will for ever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses. As Copley painted Chatham, West, Wolf, and Trumbull, Warren and Montgomery; as Dwight, Barlow, Trumbull, and Humphries composed their verse, and Belknap and Ramzay history; as Godfrey invented his quadrant, and Rittenhouse his planetarium; as Boylston practised inoculation, andFranklinelectricity; asPaineexposed the mistakes of Raynal, andJeffersonthose ofBuffon,so unphilosophically borrowed from the Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains those despicable dreams of de Pauw — neither the people, nor their conventions, committees, or sub-committees, considered legislation in any other light than ordinary arts and sciences, only as of more importance. Called without expectation, and compelled without previous inclination, though undoubtedly at the best period of time both for England and America, to erect suddenly new systems of laws for their future government, they adopted the method of a wise architect, in erecting a new palace for the residence of his sovereign. They determined to consult Vitruvius, Palladio, and all other writers of reputation in the art; to examine the most celebrated buildings, whether they remain entire or in ruins; compare these with the principles of writers; and enquire how far both the theories and models were founded in nature, or created by fancy: and, when this should be done, as far as their circumstances would allow, to adopt the advantages, and reject the inconveniences, of all. Unembarrassed by attachments to noble families, hereditary lines and successions, or any considerations of royal blood, even the pious mystery of holy oil had no more influence than that other of holy water: the people universally were too enlightened to be imposed on by artifice; and their leaders, or more properly followers, were men of too much honour to attempt it. Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind.

[Preface to 'A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America', 1787]”
― John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America

“Researching this book has been a voyage of discovery and it is a privilege to present an unexpurgated medical biography of the most consequential American of the twentieth century.”
― Steven Lomazow, FDR Unmasked: 73 Years of Medical Cover-ups That Rewrote History

“The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Josh gathered his sense of injustice and faced Rodan Man-to-man, or rather, elk-to-elk, no, Netah-to-Netah.”
― Lisa Kaniut Cobb, Down in the Valley

“Today the most civilized countries of the world spend a maximum of their income on war and a minimum on education. The twenty-first century will reverse this order. It will be more glorious to fight against ignorance than to die on the field of battle. The discovery of a new scientific truth will be more important than the squabbles of diplomats. Even the newspapers of our own day are beginning to treat scientific discoveries and the creation of fresh philosophical concepts as news. The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere 'stick' in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.

Progress along such lines will be impossible while nations persist in the savage practice of killing each other off. I inherited from my father, an erudite man who labored hard for peace, an ineradicable hatred of war.”
― Nikola Tesla

“What the American people didn’t know was how aggressive the government was in protecting our defenses and creating weapons. FDR had already secretly approved the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. And the government saw the waterfront as vital to our defenses. They feared that spies or other saboteurs would infiltrate the docks and interrupt the shipments of supplies or somehow obtain vital information about America’s secrets. They made a deal with the Mafia, specifically gangster Charles “Lucky” Luciano.”
― A.G. Russo, O'SHAUGHNESSY INVESTIGATIONS, INC.: The Cases Nobody Wanted

“Sometimes the most scenic roads in life are the detours you didn't mean to take.”
― Angela N. Blount, Once Upon a Road Trip

“The filigreed iron gates of the Navy Yard were open wide between two pillars that featured large spread-winged eagles on orbs. Men were standing around as women came out together in their overalls after their shifts. Before the war women didn’t work at the Navy Yard, but with men joining up or drafted and a new campaign with a poster of 'Rosie the Riveter' it did its job encouraging woman to work outside the home for the war effort.”
― A.G. Russo, O'SHAUGHNESSY INVESTIGATIONS, INC.: The Cases Nobody Wanted

“Jimmy’s dog tag clinked as he almost slid right into her. Teenagers wore dog tags in case New York was bombed and they needed to be identified if killed or injured. Mrs. McCorkle, the O’Shaughnessy’s immediate next door neighbor, had insisted on a dog tag for Jimmy.”
― A.G. Russo, O'SHAUGHNESSY INVESTIGATIONS, INC.: The Cases Nobody Wanted

“The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.”
― Rachel Carson

“If you’re ever stuck for an idea try eating a peanut.”
― Molly Arbuthnott, Peanut the Hamster

“Peanut was a hamster. He was furry, had four legs, a big tummy and his favourite food was, you guessed it, peanuts”
― Molly Arbuthnott, Peanut the Hamster

“In the world of the very small, where particle and wave aspects of reality are equally significant, things do not behave in any way that we can understand from our experience of the everyday world...all pictures are false, and there is no physical analogy we can make to understand what goes on inside atoms. Atoms behave like atoms, nothing else.”
― John Gribbin, In Search of Schrödinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality

“Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.”
― Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

“Paul’s last grain of hope falling to the ground below him.”
― Molly Arbuthnott, Peanut the Hamster

“Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours....”
― James D. Watson

“Even so, I’m somebody.
I’m the Discoverer of Nature.
I’m the Argonaut of true sensations.
I bring a new Universe to the Universe
Because I bring the Universe to itself.”
― Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep

“None of the people have any real interest in a science, who only begin to be enthusiastic about it when they themselves have made discoveries in it.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits