discovery

I am not an outsider. I am an insider who discovered that everyone else had gone out.

Yet the laboriously sought musical epiphany rarely compares to the unsought, even unwanted tune whose ambush is violent and sudden: the song the cab driver was tuned to, the song rumbling from the speaker wedged against the fire-escape railing, the song tingling from the transistor on the beach blanket. To locate those songs again can become, with age, something like a religious quest, as suggested by the frequent use of the phrase "Holy Grail" to describe hard-to-find tracks. The collector is haunted by the knowledge that somewhere on the planet an intact chunk of his past still exists, uncorrupted by time or circumstance.

Don__ be afraid of opening the unknown new doors; if you see the Devil inside, just know how to reclose it tightly! We exist in life to discover; if there is no discovery, there is no life!

Facts, and facts alone, are the foundation of science... When one devotes oneself to experimental research it is in order to augment the sum of known facts, or to discover their mutual relations.

There is an undeniable exhilaration in moment of even the smallest discovery

We can distinguish three groups of scientific men. In the first and very small group we have the men who discover fundamental relations. Among these are van't Hoff, Arrhenius and Nernst. In the second group we have the men who do not make the great discovery but who see the importance and bearing of it, and who preach the gospel to the heathen. Ostwald stands absolutely at the head of this group. The last group contains the rest of us, the men who have to have things explained to us.

This theory [the oxygen theory] is not as I have heard it described, that of the French chemists, it is mine (elle est la mienne); it is a property which I claim from my contemporaries and from posterity.

I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living.

Do experimental work but keep in mind that other investigators in the same field will consider your discoveries as less than one fourth as important as they seem to you.

At my urgent request the Curie laboratory, in which radium was discovered a short time ago, was shown to me. The Curies themselves were away travelling. It was a cross between a stable and a potato-cellar, and, if I had not seen the worktable with the chemical apparatus, I would have thought it a practical joke.(Wilhelm Ostwald on seeing the Curie's laboratory facilities.)

One advantage of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries

Nothings Impossible,It Just means we Haven't Discovered it Yet!

The world unwraps itself to you, again and again as soon as you are ready to see it anew.

A few years after working on Mauna Kea, I discovered that I had radiation sickness

I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.

All we know for sure is that if some astronomer turned a telescope to a far-off star cluster tonight and found incontrovertible evidence of life, even microbial scavengers, it would be the most important discovery ever__roof that human beings are not so special after all. Except that we exist, too, and can understand and make such discoveries.

In chemistry, our theories are crutches; to show that they are valid, they must be used to walk... A theory established with the help of twenty facts must explain thirty, and lead to the discovery of ten more.

I didn't know the demonsthat walked across your memory.They came from the dustwhen you were at peacein your grave.