Discovery quotes

Discovery

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Discovery quotes (page 28 of 92)

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Poet, Playwright, Novelist
Discovery

"Everything that we call Invention or Discovery in the higher sense of the word is the serious exercise and activity of an original feeling for truth, which, after a long course of silent cultivation, suddenly flashes out into fruitful knowledge."

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Poet, Playwright, Novelist
Discovery

"It used to happen, and still happens, to me to take no pleasure in a work of art at the first sight of it, because it is too much for me; but if I suspect any merit in it, I try to get at it; and then I never fail to make the most gratifying discoveries--to find new qualities in the work itself and new faculties in myself."

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Joseph Heller Novelist
Discovery

"Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur."

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Joyce Carol Oates Author, Poet
Discovery

"The act of sending a letter is an act of generosity, even if, in retrospect, it might seem reckless. Why regret one's generosity? Why regret one's impulsiveness, one's misjudgment of others? The inevitable discovery that someone is selling letters you'd written in trust is simply to discover an obvious human truth: there are those who don't cherish us as we'd cherished them, and had wished to be cherished by them."

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Julian Barnes Author
Discovery

"Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book."

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Discovery

"Onstage, of course, you have the luxury of rehearsal and discovery and time and comfort, which then turns into terror when you actually have to put it in front of people."

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Julian Huxley Biologist
Discovery

"...it is curiosity, initiative, originality, and the ruthless application of honesty that count in research- much more than feats of logic and memory alone."

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Marshall McLuhan Philosopher, Media Theorist
Discovery

"Erwin Schrodinger has explained how he and his fellow physicists had agreed that they would report their new discoveries and experiments in quantum physics in the language of Newtonian physics. That is, they agreed to discuss and report the non-visual, electronic world in the language of the visual world of Newton."

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Michel Foucault Philosopher, Social Theorist
Discovery

"We should not be content to say that power has a need for such-and-such a discovery, such-and-such a form of knowledge, but we should add that the exercise of power itself creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. ... The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power. ... It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power."

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Milan Kundera Writer
Discovery

"The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. This novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become."

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Myron Allen Businessman
Discovery

"Discovery comes as a result of positive discontent, a constructive dissatisfaction. In fact, one might quite truthfully say that there is no discovery when one is content."

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Honore de Balzac Novelist
Discovery

"The key to all sciences is unquestionably the question mark. To the word How? we owe most of our greatest discoveries. Wisdom in life may perhaps consist in asking ourselves on all occasions: Why?"

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