#discovery

Hardly a name in profane history is more august than his. Hardly another character in the world's record has made so little of its opportunities. His discovery was a blunder; his blunder was a new world; the New World is his monument. ↗

— Justin Winsor

#august #blunder #character #discovery #hardly

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man! ↗

— Ralph Ellison

#literature #self-discovery #life

It was so quiet, I could hear my own breathing, loud in my ears. Outside, the ocean was crashing, waves hitting sand, then pulling back to sea. I thought of everything being washed away, again and again. We make such messes in this life, both accidentally and on purpose. But wiping the surface clean doesn't really make anything any neater. It just masks what is below. It's only when you really dig down deep, go underground, that you can see who you really are. ↗

— Sarah Dessen

#self-discovery #life

But, astonishingly, I'm not broken. I'm not destroyed. Terrified witless, shaking, retching with fear, yes. But no longer insecure. Because during my search for how you died, I somehow found myself to be a different person. ... Living my life. And it wouldn't be my grief for you that toppled the mountain, but love. ↗

— Rosamund Lupton

#self-discovery #life

If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within; secondary reality without. ↗

— Eckhart Tolle

#spiritual

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story. ↗

— Charles Baxter

#discovery #fiction #mystery #overdetermination #perfection

the buddhists say there are 149 ways to god. i'm not looking for god, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#fate #self-discovery #understanding #destiny

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance -- it is the illusion of knowledge. ↗

— Daniel J. Boorstin

#earth #illusion #illusion

Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male. ↗

— Max Lerner

#civilization #discovery #fire #greatest #human

There is nothing so good for the human soul as the discovery that there are ancient and flourishing civilized societies which have somehow managed to exist for many centuries and are still in being though they have had no help from the traveler in solving their problems. ↗

— Walter Lippmann

#being #centuries #civilized #discovery #exist