Mistakes are the portals of discovery.
—James Joyce
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
—Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
—Carl Sagan in Cosmos
If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.
—John A. Wheeler
For a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.
—E. B. White
Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is—and still not caring.
—Tom Robbins
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
—Arthur Koestler
To be a consumer is the most primitive level of being. It is to be a mouth, an eater, a devourer of things. To discover the truth of who we are, we must discard the consumer mentality and reclaim our spiritual dignity.
—David Frawley
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
—Galileo Galilei
The gain is not the having of children; it is the discovery of love and how to be loving.
—Polly Berrien Berends
The world is full of hundreds of beautiful things we can never possibly have time to discover, and there is no time to be unkind or envious or ungenerous, and no sense in enslaving the mind to the trivialities of the moment. For you can be equal to the greatness of life only by marching with it; not by seeking love but by giving it, nor seeking to be understood but learning to understand. And when it is all over, there will be an agony of remorse because one spared the effort and did not make more of that little span of opportunity; and knowing reality at last, who knows but that one will look back with unassuageable regret upon one's pitiful little faith.
—Vivienne de Watteville
What a pity, when Christopher Colombus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.
—Margot Asquith
Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.
—Jackson Pollock
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
—Paul Valéry