62 Discovery Quotes To Inspire

There's something uniquely exhilarating about the concept of discovery. Whether it's uncovering new facets of the world around us, delving into the depths of personal introspection, or igniting the spark of innovation, discovery fuels our quest for knowledge and growth. To celebrate this boundless journey of exploration, we've curated a collection of 62 inspiring quotes that capture the essence of discovery. These words of wisdom, drawn from the experiences and insights of great thinkers, adventurers, and innovators, are sure to ignite your curiosity and motivate you to pursue your own path of discovery. So, sit back, and let these powerful quotes inspire your next great adventure.

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

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

3. “Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.” - Oscar Wilde

4. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” - Marcel Proust

5. “Most of them had not understood Blackberry's discovery of the raft and at once forgot it.” - Richard Adams

6. “We are usually convinced more easily by reasons we have found ourselves than by those which have occurred to others.” - Blaise Pascal

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

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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “I said I *liked* being half-educated; you were so much more *surprised* at everything when you were ignorant.” - Gerald Durrell

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

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

14. “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

15. “Ketika untuk pertama kalinya saya berhasil menanam padi dengan metoda tanpa pengolahan, saya merasa benar-benar puas seperti apa yang dirasakan Colombus ketika ia menemukan benua Amerika” - Masanobu Fukuoka

16. “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

17. “Sometimes a clearly defined error is the only way to discover the truth” - Benjamin Wiker

18. “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

19. “Believing himself to be unseen by other bathers, he gave himself up to being alone with his body. He wriggled his toes, breathed hard through his nose, twisted his brown moustache where some drops of water still clung, and looked himself critically all over. The scrutiny seemed to satisfy him, as well as it might. I, whose only acquaintance was with bodies and minds developing, was suddenly confronted by maturity in its most undeniable form; and I wondered, what must it feel like to be him, master of those limbs which have passed beyond the need of gym and playing field, and exist for their own beauty and strength? What can they do, I thought, to be conscious of themselves?” - L.P. Hartley

20. “I believe one has to escape oneself to discover oneself.” - Rabih Alameddine

21. “The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.” - Ezra Pound

22. “Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in their jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journey of exploration and discovery.” - David Almond

23. “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

24. “The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.” - Beryl Markham

25. “I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be.” - Ernesto Che Guevara

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

27. “The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities... If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.” - Rachel Carson

28. “We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.” - George Eliot

29. “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

30. “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

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

32. “Lands of great discoveries are also lands of great injustices.” - Ivo Andrić

33. “Imagine waking up one morning and finding a piece of yourself you didn't even know existed.” - Jodi Picoult

34. “One does not have to be a philosopher to be a successful artist, but he does have to be an artist to be a successful philosopher. His nature is to view the world in an unpredictable albeit useful light.” - Criss Jami

35. “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

36. “We can't impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.” - Donella H. Meadows

37. “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

38. “It's like looking through a microscope your whole life," he (Justin) said. "You miss the whole picture. Sometimes you need to get lost in order to discover anything.” - Katie Kacvinsky

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

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

43. “There's a difference between thinking you can't be wrong and having no regrets. Wrongness is what occurs prior to empiricism, in hindsight a counterpart of revelation, and revelation is nothing to regret.” - Criss Jami

44. “In the first place, most princes apply themselves to the arts of war, in which I have neither ability nor interest, instead of to the good arts of peace. They are generally more set on acquiring new kingdoms by hook or by crook than on governing well those that they already have.” - Thomas More

45. “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

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

47. “Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.” - William Golding

48. “Do not ignore inspiration, it is your guide to self discovery.” - E'yen A. Gardner

49. “The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started in the creation of the work. In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness. When a simile takes us aback and persuades us together, when we find a juxtaposition in a picture both odd and intriguing, when a theory is at once fresh and convincing, we do not merely nod over someone else's work. We re-enact the creative act, and we ourselves make the discovery again......Reality is not an exhibit for man's inspection, labeled: "Do not touch." There are no appearances to be photographed, no experiences to be copied, in which we do not take part. We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.” - Jacob Bronowski

50. “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

51. “There is an undeniable exhilaration in moment of even the smallest discovery” - Graham Moore

52. “I feel like a child who has found a wonderful trail in the woods. Countless others have gone before and blazed the trail, but to the child it's as new and fresh as if it had never been walked before. The child is invariably anxious for others to join in the great adventure. It's something that can only be understood by actual experience. Those who've begun the journey, and certainly those who've gone further than I, will readily understand what I am saying.” - Randy Alcorn

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

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

55. “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

56. “I didn't know the demonsthat walked across your memory.They came from the dustwhen you were at peacein your grave.” - Susie Clevenger

57. “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

58. “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

59. “The rock I'd seen in my life looked dull because in all ignorance I'd never thought to knock it open. People have cracked ordinary New England pegmatite - big, coarse granite - and laid bare clusters of red garnets, or topaz crystals, chrysoberyl, spodumene, emerald. They held in their hands crystals that had hung in a hole in the dark for a billion years unseen. I was all for it. I would lay about me right and left with a hammer, and bash the landscape to bits. I would crack the earth's crust like a piñata and spread to the light the vivid prizes in chunks within. Rock collecting was opening the mountains. It was like diving through my own interior blank blackness to remember the startling pieces of a dream: there was a blue lake, a witch, a lighthouse, a yellow path. It was like poking about in a grimy alley and finding an old, old coin. Nothing was at it seemed. The earth was like a shut eye. Mother's not dead, dear - she's only sleeping. Pry open the thin lid and find a crystalline intelligence inside, a rayed and sidereal beauty. Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetical flowers. They lengthened and spread, adding plane to plane in awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even the stones - maybe only the stones - understood.” - Annie Dillard

60. “Every symbol, word, concept, discipline and field is only a temporary rest stop on the highway of discovery.” - Bryant McGill

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

62. “After you've seen behind the facade of a stage set you can't take the play seriously any more. You can't go backwards and regain your ignorance; you have to move forward.” - Zeena Schreck