Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.

I have just got a new theory of eternity.

What occurs to me at this second is this: There is a huge world out there. I only know my dumb family and my dumb house and my dumb school and my dumb job. But...

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...

Learning to navigate the unpredictable terrain of life is an essential skill to develop. We can’t live a happy life if we are unwilling to pave the path that will lead to our personal fulfillment...

Every invention began as an imagination.

In an age of guidebooks, websites, and radio waves, discovery has nearly become a lost feeling. If anything, it is now a matter of expectations to surpass—rarely a matter of unexpected wonderment. It is unusual...

Speaking one day to Monsieur de Buffon, on the present ardor of chemical inquiry, he affected to consider chemistry but as cookery, and to place the toils of the laboratory on the footing with those...

There was not a lot of cohesion in that group of 30. Discovery, I think, was waiting to try and get Hincapie back up there. But knowing it was my last race, I certainly wasn’t...

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history… It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate...

don’t make too much noise”. October’s dust in my lungs, maybe I don’t want bits of four AM lingering in my subconscious. Smokers breathe in fire, coat their insides in ash. Is that suicide or...

Our novice runs the risk of failure without additional traits: a strong inclination toward originality, a taste for research, and a desire to experience the incomparable gratification associated with the act of discovery itself.

The mind, stretched to new dimensions by images, thoughts and ideas, can never return to its former shape.