You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about, the more you have left when anything happens.
Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the co-operation of many minds. I may be given credit for having blazed the trail but when I look at the subsequent developments I feel the credit is due to others rather than to myself.
"Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do so you will be certain to find something that you have never seen before. Follow it up, explore all around it, and before you know it, you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the results of thought."
As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found - in himself.
“Are you not also a seeker of the right path?”
There was a smile in Siddhartha’s old eyes as he said: “Do you call yourself a seeker, 0' venerable one, you who are already advanced in years and wear the robe of Gotama’s monks.”
“I am indeed old,” said Govinda, “but I have never ceased seeking. I will never cease seeking. That seems to be my destiny. It seems to me that you also have sought. Will you talk to me a little about it, friend?”
Siddhartha said: “What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.”
“How is that?” asked Govinda.
“When someone is seeking,” said Siddhartha, “it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, 0' worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.”
No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.
What Des-Cartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, & especially in taking ye colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.
-Sir Isaac Newton, letter to his colleague Robert Hooke dated 5 February 1676
"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of hundreds of others, in seeing the hundreds of universes that each of them sees.
Breaking free from extremely limited capacities of the present-day physical body and having gotten rid of the limits, a man may embark on a journey to a new knowledge, which is being born in his or her dreams. Nobody and nothing can stop such a man for he or she, having tasted freedom, has touched upon the capacities lying within a man. He or she has understood that life is a permanent creation of perfecting his or her soul through the world matter. It is only in this process that a man is implementing the plan of God – to be a man created after His image. This is the main aim, essence and cause of living - to permanently study how to create the new.
It-was a tiny mollusc that caused Walter, grandfather of the greatest biologist of the twentieth century, to forge a brief link with the greatest biologist of the nineteenth: Charles Darwin. . . . . . We know this because later that day he wrote hesitantly to Darwin to report what he had found. “I secured a female Dytiscus marginalis,” he told the great evolutionist, “with a small bivalve [cockle] that I think is Sphaerium corneum very firmly attached to its leg.” Darwin replied three days later with a barrage of questions.....
Darwin published a letter in Nature describing Crick’s cockles, as a triumphant vindication of his long-held theory that peripatetic molluscs hitch lifts with other animals to get from pond to pond. It was to be Darwin’s last publication: 13 days later, he died.
-Matt Ridley, Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code [ISBN-IO: 0-0-721330-1], 2006
As a small boy Francis Crick had been haunted by a fear that by the time he grew up everything would have been discovered. Inspired by Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia, the boy had become fascinated by the unexpectedness of scientific answers. From a very early age he longed to find some of his own, but would there be anything left? “Don’t worry, ducky,” said his mother. “There will be plenty left for you to find out.”
-Matt Ridley, Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code, 2006
If one yearns to see the face of the Divine, one must break out of the aquarium, escape the fish farm, to go swim up wild cataracts, dive in deep fjords. One must explore the labyrinth of the reef, the shadows of the lily pads. How limiting, how insulting to think of God as a benevolent warden, an absentee hatchery manager who imprisons us in the 'comfort' of artificial pools, where intermediaries sprinkle our restrictive waters with sanitized flakes of processed nutriment.
Why seek to scale Mount Everest,
Queen of the Air,
Why strive to crown that cruel crest
And deathward dare?
Said Mallory of dauntless quest
'Because it's there.'
To be worth making at all a journey has to be made in the mind as much as in the world of objects and dimensions. What value can there be in seeing or experiencing anything for the first time unless it comes as a revelation? And for that to happen, some previously held thought or belief must be confounded, or enhanced, or even transcended. What difference can it make otherwise to see a redwood tree, a tiger, or a humming bird?
"Where would we be if throughout history, our greatest minds had feared that which they could not confirm? Embrace the unknown with caution, but not with fear."
A human being is only interesting if he's in contact with himself. I learned you have to trust yourself, be what you are, and do what you ought to do the way you should do it. You have got to discover you, what you do, and trust it.
For the rest,
Whatever we have got has been by infinite labor, and search, and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is that instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round -- for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost -- do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as be awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
Decisive inventions and discoveries always are initiated by an intellectual or moral stimulus as their actual motivating force, but, usually, the final impetus to human action is given by material impulses ... merchants stood as a driving force behind the heroes of the age of discovery; this first heroic impulse to conquer the world emanated from very mortal forces—in the beginning, there was spice.
Books about Discovery
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