50 Discovery Quotes To Inspire

Exploring the world through the lens of discovery can be incredibly uplifting and transformative. Whether you're an adventurer at heart or someone seeking fresh perspectives, words of wisdom can often spark the motivation you need to explore new horizons. In this blog post, we've gathered fifty of the most inspiring quotes about discovery. These carefully selected pieces of wisdom offer both guidance and encouragement, reminding us that the journey of discovery is as valuable as the destination itself. Prepare to be inspired and embark on a journey of endless possibilities.

1. “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” - Andre Gide

2. “A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension.I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up at the very center of the glow.In a lifetime of being wrong at many a point, I was never more wrong. It was I, not he, who was wandering in the periphery. It was he, not I, who lived in the blaze.I had fallen victim to the fallacy of the 'growing edge;' the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded and dead.But is that true? Because a tree in spring buds and comes greenly into leaf, are those leaves therefore the tree? If the newborn twigs and their leaves were all that existed, they would form a vague halo of green suspended in mid-air, but surely that is not the tree. The leaves, by themselves, are no more than trivial fluttering decoration. It is the trunk and limbs that give the tree its grandeur and the leaves themselves their meaning.There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. 'If I have seen further than other men,' said Isaac Newton, 'it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” - Isaac Asimov

3. “Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.” - Chuck Palahniuk

4. “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” - Mahatma Gandhi

5. “When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.” - Charles Baxter

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

7. “It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.[Recalling in 1936 the discovery of the nucleus in 1909, when some alpha particles were observed instead of travelling through a very thin gold foil were seen to rebound backward, as if striking something much more massive than the particles themselves. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery.]” - Ernest Rutherford

8. “The ragamuffin who sees his life as a voyage of discovery and runs the risk of failure has a better feel for faithfulness than the timid man who hides behind the law and never finds out who he is at all.” - Brennan Manning

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

10. “There's something liberating about not pretending. Dare to embarrass yourself. Risk.” - Drew Barrymore

11. “A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.” - Abraham Lincoln

12. “In other studies you go as far as other have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.” - Mary Shelley

13. “Building a museum case and filling it with types of mussels is one way of knowing mussels; but on the shore, a mussel leads to a crab or a curious stone, which leads to another thing and eventually leads back to mussels, which is another and perhaps a more far-reaching way to know mussels. The sea that always seems like a metaphor, but one that is always moving, cannot be fixed, like a heart that is a like a tongue that is like a mystery that is like a story that is like a border that is like something altogether different and like everything at once. One thing leads to another, and this is the treasure that always runs through your fingers and never runs out.” - Rebecca Solnit

14. “Writing is both an act of power and surrender. Passion and discovery. It is a tug at your soul that continues to pull you forward, even as you go kicking and screaming.” (p.18)” - Laraine Herring

15. “The final discovery is the discovery of knowledge.” - Kedar Joshi

16. “A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.” - Alice Munro

17. “No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.” - Isaac Newton

18. “The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew.” - Gregory Maguire

19. “As time goes on, new and remoter aspects of truth are discovered which can seldom be fitted into creeds that are changeless.” - Clarence Day

20. “It is ... through the world of the imagination which takes us beyond the restrictions of provable fact, that we touch the hem of truth.” - Madeleine L'Engle

21. “In science ... "discovery" can mean finding a guppy with an extra spine in its dorsal fin.” - Thomas Hayden

22. “It's a fact—everyone is ignorant in some way or another.Ignorance is our deepest secret.And it is one of the scariest things out there, because those of us who are most ignorant are also the ones who often don't know it or don't want to admit it.Here is a quick test:If you have never changed your mind about some fundamental tenet of your belief, if you have never questioned the basics, and if you have no wish to do so, then you are likely ignorant.Before it is too late, go out there and find someone who, in your opinion, believes, assumes, or considers certain things very strongly and very differently from you, and just have a basic honest conversation.It will do both of you good.” - Vera Nazarian

23. “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

24. “In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution. Anything which is created must, sooner or later, die. If enlightenment were created in such a way, there would always be a possibility of ego reasserting itself, causing a return to the confused state. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it.” - CHOGYAM TRUNGPA

25. “It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.” - Thomas Pynchon

26. “Every man has a specific skill, whether it is discovered or not, that more readily and naturally comes to him than it would to another, and his own should be sought and polished. He excels best in his niche - originality loses its authenticity in one's efforts to obtain originality.” - Criss Jami

27. “The offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.” - Christopher Hitchens

28. “Robots are important also. If I don my pure-scientist hat, I would say just send robots; I'll stay down here and get the data. But nobody's ever given a parade for a robot. Nobody's ever named a high school after a robot. So when I don my public-educator hat, I have to recognize the elements of exploration that excite people. It's not only the discoveries and the beautiful photos that come down from the heavens; it's the vicarious participation in discovery itself.” - Neil deGrasse Tyson

29. “It’s the unknown that draws people.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

30. “Love, like everything else in life, should be a discovery, an adventure, and like most adventures, you don’t know you’re having one until you’re right in the middle of it.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

31. “If it's true what is said, that only the wise discover the wise, then it must also be true that the lone wolf symbolizes either the biggest fool on the planet or the biggest Einstein on the planet.” - Criss Jami

32. “Truth is like a vast tree which yields more and more fruit the more you nurture it. The deeper the search in the mind of truth, the richer the discovery of the gems buried there.” - Mahatma Gandhi

33. “How my life has been brought to undiscovered lands, and how much richer it gets - all from words printed on a page.... How a book can have 560 pages, but in only three pages change the reader's life.” - Emoke B'Racz

34. “Still round the corner there may wait, A new road or a secret gate.” - J. R. R. Tolkien

35. “I remember when we found the first population of living Cerion agassizi in central Eleuthera. Our hypothesis of Cerion's general pattern required that two predictions be affirmed (or else we were in trouble): this population must disappear by hybridization with mottled shells toward bank-interior coasts and with ribby snails toward the bank-edge. We hiked west toward the bank-interior and easily found hybrids right on the verge of the airport road. We then moved east toward the bank-edge along a disused road with vegetation rising to five feet in the center between the tire paths. We should have found our hybrids but we did not. The Cerion agassizi simply stopped about two hundred yards north of our first ribby Cerion. Then we realized that a pond lay just to our east and that ribby forms, with their coastal preferences, might not favor the western side of the pond. We forded the pond and found a classic hybrid zone between Cerion agassizi and ribby Cerions. (Ribby Cerion had just managed to round the south end of the pond, but had not moved sufficiently north along the west side to establish contact with C. agassizi populations.) I wanted to shout for joy. Then I thought, "But who can I tell; who cares?" And I answered myself, "I don't have to tell anyone. We have just seen and understood something that no one has ever seen and understood before. What more does a man need?” - Stephen Jay Gould

36. “I am not an outsider. I am an insider who discovered that everyone else had gone out.” - Stephen J. Day

37. “I don't know what is behind the curtain; only that I need to find out.” - Richard Paul Evans

38. “To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts; seeks for higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only region of discovery.” - George MacDonald

39. “There are plenty of theories to listen to and follow but truth yearns to be discovered. When you find it, there is no doubt where to go.” - E'yen A. Gardner

40. “The world is always open, Waiting to be discovered.” - Dejan Stojanovic

41. “If you knew all about it, it wouldn't be the leading edge.” - Karl Pribram

42. “Sara: Tegan just recently discovered that unicorns don’t exist. Tegan: I just thought they were extinct.” - Tegan and Sara

43. “Hive Queen: They never know anything. They don't have enough years in their little lives to come to an understanding of anything at all. And yet they think they understand. From earliest childhood, they delude themselves into thinking they comprehend the world, while all that's really going on is that they've got some primitive assumptions and prejudices. As they get older they learn a more elevated vocabulary in which to express their mindless pseudo- knowledge and bully other people into accepting their prejudices as if they were truth, but it all amounts to the same thing. Individually, human beings are all dolts.Pequenino: While collectively...Hive Queen: Collectively, they're a collection of dolts. But in all their scurrying around and pretending to be wise, throwing out idiotic half-understood theories about this and that, one or two of them will come up with some idea that is just a little bit closer to the truth than what was already known. And in a sort of fumbling trial and error, about half the time the truth actually rises to the top and becomes accepted by people who still don't understand it, who simply adopt it as a new prejudice to be trusted blindly until the next dolt accidentally comes up with an improvement.>Pequenino: So you're saying that no one is ever individually intelligent, and groups are even stupider than individuals-- and yet by keeping so many fools engaged in pretending to be intelligent, they still come up with some of the same results that an intelligent species would come up with.Hive Queen: Exactly.” - Orson Scott Card

44. “To find is the thing.” - Pablo Picasso

45. “It was youWho opened meLooked into my soulTo study meYou revealed youTo uncover me.” - David Somorai

46. “Wieder hob sie den Blick und richtete die Lampe auf ihr Gesicht. Sie schaute zum Fenster hinüber. Ihre Züge waren jetzt fast noch deutlicher. Sie konnte die Details um ihre Nase studieren, den Mund. Die Haare. Sie sah nicht gut aus. Resigniert schaltete sie die Lampe aus und ließ sie sinken.Und da sah sie es.Ihr Spiegelbild verschwand nicht.Es blieb im Fenster hängen, noch deutlicher als zuvor.Eine Sekunge lang ließ sie sich davon einfach faszinieren.Sie schnitt eine Grimasse.Aber das Spiegelbild veränderte sich nicht.” - Johan Harstad

47. “Days passing with discovery are the days of real happiness.” - Mehmet Murat ildan

48. “If there is passion, let me feel its heat.I want my heart to beat fast,my breath raspy, my skin to burn.” - Susie Clevenger

49. “One day an intrepid sole will climb this mountain on its east side, reaching the summit and the passage that exist between the main peak and secondary peaks, by which he can descend to the west side of the mountain. It is at this site near Lake Brunner, between the main peak and an adjacent stone pyramid, in a "hidden cave" that has been sealed by earthquakes common in the region . . . where lust for Inca gold must end for some . . . but for that intrepid sole . . . it shall be just the beginning!” - Steven J. Charbonneau

50. “The mind, stretched to new dimensions by images, thoughts and ideas, can never return to its former shape.” - Travis Luedke