Famous Quotes & Sayings

Robertson Davies

Civilization rests on two things: the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and the voluntary ability to inhibit defecation. And I put it to you, where would this splendid civilization be without both?

Virginia Woolf

I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?

Virginia Woolf

... it's been a perpetual discovery, my life. A miracle.

Werner Erhard

This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so.

Walker Percy

Your discovery, as best as I can determine, is that there is an alternative which no one has hit upon. It is that one finding oneself in one of life's critical situations need not after all respond in one of the traditional ways. No. One may simply default. Pass. Do as one pleases, shrug, turn on one's heel and leave. Exit. Why after all need one act humanly?

Walker Percy

Genius consists not in making great discoveries, but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.

Salvador Dali

Photographic fantasy: more agile and faster in discoveries than murky subconscious processes!

Virginia Postrel

How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis-a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism-a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition?

Vincent Bugliosi

The conspiracy community regularly seizes on one slip of the tongue, misunderstanding, or slight discrepancy to defeat twenty pieces of solid evidence; accepts one witness of theirs, even if he or she is a provable nut, as being far more credible than ten normal witnesses on the other side; treats rumors, even questions, as the equivalent of proof; leaps from the most minuscule of discoveries to the grandest of conclusions; and insists that the failure to explain everything perfectly negates all that is explained.

W. H. Auden

One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.

W. H. Auden

I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.

Stephen Bayley

I have put [the word] "discoveries" in inverted commas because scientific results, perhaps as much at least as artistic achievements, are a product of contemporary taste, driven by momentary appetites rather than eternal verities.

Thomas B. Macaulay

When the great Kepler bad at length discovered the harmonic laws that regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, he exclaimed: "Whether my discoveries will be read by posterity or by my contemporaries is a matter that concerns them more than me. I may well be contented to wait one century for a reader, when God Himself, during so many thousand years, has waited for an observer like myself.

Thomas Keating

The wisdom of all religions has to be respected. The discoveries of science are also essential for our time and the future.

Gordon Gee

Intellectual curiosity drove Einstein to some of the world's most important discoveries.

Gladys Taber

Life is a process of discovery, of new perceptions.

Giuseppe Mazzini

The obscurest sayings of the truly great are often those which contain the germ of the profoundest and most useful truths. Genius rapidly traverses the living present to bury itself in the deepest mysteries of the universe; often making the grandest discoveries at a single glance.

Herman Melville

All we discover has been with us since the sun began to roll; and much we discover, is not worth the discovering.

Henry David Thoreau

So far as inland discovery was concerned, the adventurous spirit of the English was that of sailors who land but for a day, and their enterprise the enterprise of traders.

Jerry Gillies

You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need.

Christopher Hitchens

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

We have lived in a world where the discoveries of physics and genetics are far more awe-inspiring, as well as infinitely more liberating, than the claims of any religion.

Jeanette Winterson

There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.

Jeff Bezos

There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

Georges Cuvier

Nurse, it was I who discovered that leeches have red blood.[]On his deathbed when the nurse came to apply leeches

George Will

The education of this president [Obama] is a protracted and often amusing process . . . as he continues to alight upon the obvious with a sense of profound and original discovery.

Herbert Hoover

The more one observes, the more clearly does he see that it is in the soil of pure science that are found the origins of all our modern industry and commerce. In fact,our civilization is wholly built upon our scientific discoveries.

Ernest Hemingway

that every day should be a fiesta seemed to me a marvelous discovery

Esa-Pekka Salonen

Orphei Drängar possesses a combination of power, energy, and culture. Joy of discovery combined with professional technical and musical prowess.

Honor Harger

The study of celestial phenomena at radio wavelengths, radio astronomy came into being after the accidental discovery of cosmic radiation by radio engineer Karl Jansky in 1933.

Hannah Arendt

Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

Gottfried Leibniz

It is worth noting that the notation facilitates discovery. This, in a most wonderful way, reduces the mind's labour.

Freeman Dyson

Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox.