Extracts
On Discovery
Selected from the Spring 2017 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable desire to seek the truth.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 45 BC
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you. For every one that asks receives; and he that seeks finds; and to him that knocks, it shall be opened.
—The Gospel According to Matthew, c. 80
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
—Francis Bacon, 1605
The poets declare that the wisest heroes were those who visited many places and roamed over the world; for the poets regard it as a great achievement to have “seen the cities and known the minds of many men.”
—Strabo, c. 20
One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
—André Gide, 1926
From nothing I have created a wholly new world. All that I have hitherto sent you compares to this only as a house of cards to a castle.
—János Bolyai, 1823
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851
New things are always ugly.
—Willa Cather, 1921
When they shout “Long live progress,” always ask, “Progress of what?”
—Stanisław Jerzy Lec, 1957
The wicked wit of man always studies to apply the result of talents to enslaving, destroying, or cheating his fellow creatures. Could we reach the moon, we should think of reducing it to a province of some European kingdom.
—Horace Walpole, 1783
I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.
—Maxine Hong Kingston, 1976
The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.
—Albert Einstein, 1936
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
—Edith Wharton, 1924
How gloriously legible are the constellations of the heavens!
—Anthony Trollope, 1859
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
—Zora Neale Hurston, 1942
What one man can invent another can discover.
—Arthur Conan Doyle, 1905
The atavistic urge toward danger persists and its satisfaction is called adventure.
—John Steinbeck, 1941
I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.
—Herman Melville, 1851
The unknown is the largest need of the intellect.
—Emily Dickinson, 1876
Appearances are a glimpse of the obscure.
—Anaxagoras, c. 450 BC
There are truths that prove their discoverers witless.
—Karl Kraus, 1909
I do not think more credit is due to a man for defining a species than to a carpenter for making a box. But I am foolish and rabid against species-mongers, or rather against their vanity; it is useful and necessary work which must be done; but they act as if they had actually made the species, and it was their own property.
—Charles Darwin, 1849
He who wishes to rejoice without doubt in regard to the truths underlying phenomena must know how to devote himself to experiment.
—Roger Bacon, 1267
I do not think I have ever corrected the last proof of a memoir without finding in the course of twenty-four hours a few points that I could have done better or more carefully.
—Hermann von Helmholtz, 1891
A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
—James Joyce, 1922
We take more delight in artificial delusions than in natural truths. Besides, we shall want employments for our senses and subjects for arguments. For were there nothing but truth and no falsehood, there would be no occasion to dispute, and by this means we should want the aim and pleasure of our endeavors in confuting and contradicting each other.
—Margaret Cavendish, 1666
Science is a cemetery of dead ideas.
—Miguel de Unamuno, 1913
The discovery, then, being of persons, it may be that of one party only to the other, the latter being already known; or both the parties may have to discover themselves.
—Aristotle, c. 335 BC
The man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude; the poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion.
—William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1802
What a tremendous stir this would make in the world! How soon will it come?
—Nikola Tesla, 1899
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DISCOVERY
Spring 2017