This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The visible marks of extraordinary wisdom and power appear so plainly in all the works of the creation that a rational creature, who will but seriously reflect on them, cannot miss the discovery of the Deity." - John Locke
"All those who labor in the discovery and communication of truth, if they are actuated by a love of it and a sense of its importance to the happiness of mankind may consider themselves as workers together with God." - Joseph Priestley
"Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought." - Albert Szent-Gyorgi
"A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind." - Albert Szent-Gyorgi
"Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought." - Albert Szent-Gyorgi
"Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different." - Albert Szent-Gyorgi
"Serving God is the way to gain knowledge of Him. God is the source of life, knowledge – everything – and gaining a close, intimate knowledge of God through our service to Him is the ultimate experience. He is the ultimate mystery – and the ultimate discovery." - Ezriel Tauber
"May every young scientist remember and not fail to keep his eyes open for the possibility that an irritating failure of his apparatus to give consistent results may once or twice in a lifetime conceal an important discovery." - Patrick Blackett, bully Baron Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett
"Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful. Better a thousand fold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people." - Charles Bradlaugh
"Most of us don't get epiphanies. We only get a whisper - a faint urge. That's it. That's the call. It's up to you to do the work of discovery, to connect it to an answer." - Po Bronson
"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." - Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi de Nagyrápolt
"Man’s dwelling place, who could found you on reasoning, or build your walls with logic? You exist, and you exist not. You are, and are not. True, you are made out of diverse materials, but for your discovery an inventive mind was needed. Thus if a man pulled his house to pieces, with the design of understanding it, all he would have before him would be heaps of bricks and stones and tiles. he would not be able to discover therein the silence, the shadows and the privacy they bestowed. Nor would he see what service this mass of bricks, stones and tiles could render him, now that they lacked the heart and soul of the architect, the inventive mind which dominated them. For in mere stone the heart and soul of man have no place. But since reasoning can deal with only such material things as bricks and stones and tiles, and there is no reasoning about the heart and soul that dominate them and thus transform them into silence - inasmuch as the heart and soul have no concern with the rules of logic or the science of numbers - this is where I step in and impose my will. I, the architect; I, who have a heart and soul; I, who wield the power of transforming stone into silence. I step in and mold that clay, which is the raw material, into the likeness of the creative vision that comes to me from God; and not through any faculty of reason. Thus, taken solely by the savor it will have, I build my civilization; as poets build their poems, bending phrases to their will and changing words, without being called upon to justify the phrasing of the changes, but taken solely by the savor these will have, vouched by their hearts." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Man's "progress' is but a gradual discovery that his questions have no meaning." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards." - Arthur Koestler
"The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." - Author Unknown NULL
"Analogy, although it is not infallible, is yet the telescope of the mind by which it is marvelously assisted in the discovery of both physical and moral truth." - Charles Caleb Colton
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin, fully Daniel Joseph Boorstin
"There is probably nothing more sublime than discontent transmuted into a work of art, a scientific discovery, and so on." - Eric Hoffer
"The knowledge of a single fact acquired through a discovery of its causes prepares the mind to understand and ascertain other facts without need of recourse to experiment." - Galileo Galilei, known simply as Galileo
"The mind-expanding discovery of quantum mechanics is that Newtonian physics does not apply to subatomic phenomena... We cannot know both the position and the momentum of a particle with absolute precision... This is Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle." - Gary Zukav
"The greatest miracle is the discovery that all is miraculous. And the nature of the miraculous is- utter simplicity." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become the path himself." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"True spirituality is not a removal or escape from life. It is an opening, a seeing of the world with a deeper vision that is less self-centered, a vision that sees through dualistic views to the underlying interconnectedness of all life. Liberation is the discovery of freedom in the very midst of our bodies and minds." - Jack Kornfield
"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." - James Joyce
"Mistakes are the portals of discovery." - James Joyce
"In order to get any truth about myself, I must have contact with another person. The other is indispensable to my own existence, as well as to my knowledge bout myself. This being so, in discovering my inner being I discover the other person at the same time, like a freedom placed in front of me which thinks and wills only for or against me. Hence, let us at once announce the discovery of a world which we shall call inter-subjectivity; this is the world in which man decides what he is and what others are." - Jean-Paul Sartre
"Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully avoid." - John Keats
"Albeit failure in any cause produces a correspondent misery in the soul, yet it is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully eschew." - John Keats
"Among the many acts of gratitude we owe to God, it may be accounted one to study and contemplate the perfections and beauties of His work of creation. Every new discovery must necessarily raise in us a fresh sense of the greatness, wisdom, and power of God." - Jonathan Edwards
"The wise man endeavors to shine in himself; the fool to outshine others. The first is humbled by the sense of his own infirmities, the last is lifted up by the discovery of these which he observes in other men. The wise man considers what he wants, and the fool what he abounds in. The wise man is happy when he gains his own approbation, and the fool when he recommends himself to the applause of those about him." - Joseph Addison
"For the reality to which the artist and the mystic are exposed, is in fact, the same. It is of their own inmost truth brought to consciousness: by the mystic, in direct confrontation, and by the artist, through reflection in the masterworks of his art. The fact that the nature of the artist (as a microcosm) and the nature of the universe (as the macrocosm) are two aspects of the same reality (respectively, as a minute part of the whole, experienced from within, and as the whole, viewed from without... accounts sufficiently for that creative interplay of discovery and recognition which alerts the artist to the possibility of a revelatory composition in which outer and inner realities are recognized as the same." - Joseph Campbell
"Every discovery contains an "irrational element" or creative intuition." - Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
"Wrongs are often forgiven, but contempt never is. Our pride remembers it forever. It implies a discovery of weaknesses, which we are much more careful to conceal than crimes." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"To know how to wonder and question is the first step of the mind toward discovery." - Louis Pasteur
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
"The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
"Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery." - Martha Graham
"Nothing which can be learned by instruction cannot also be learned by discovery." - Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
"Nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is humility. It is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived, the starting point for a fresh development." - Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
"The general tendency of scientific discovery has been to weaken not only religious but ethical values." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"Love is a process, not a serendipitous discovery." - Robert C. Solomon
"Laughable error and profound discovery are born of the same freedom." - Robert Grudin
"Our minds are so constructed that we can keep the attention fixed on a particular object until we have, as it were, looked all around it; and the mind that possesses this faculty in the highest degree of perfection will take cognizance of relations of which another mind has no perception. It is this, much more than any difference in the abstract power of reasoning, which constitutes the vast difference between the minds of different individuals. This is the history alike of the poetic genius and of the genius of discovery in science. “I keep the subject,” said Sir Isaac Newton, “constantly before me, and wait until the dawnings open by little and little into a full light.” It was thus that after long meditation he was led to the invention of fluxions, and to the anticipation of the modern discovery of the combustibility of the diamond. It was thus that Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, and that those views were suggested by Davy which laid the foundation of that grand series of experimental researches which terminated in the decomposition of the earths and alkalies." - Benjamin Collins Brodie, fully Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet
"It is attention, more than any difference between minds and men.—In this is the source of poetic genius, and of the genius of discovery in science.—It was this that led Newton to the invention of fluxions, and the discovery of gravitation, and Harvey to find out the circulation of the blood, and Davy to those views which laid the foundation of modern chemistry." - Benjamin Collins Brodie, fully Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet
"The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves... You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing." - Socrates NULL
"Psychiatry’s chief contribution to philosophy is the discovery that the toilet is the seat of the soul." - Stuart Alexander Chase