Discovery Quotes - page 9
Of the splendid constellation of great names... we admire the living and revere dead far too warmly and too deeply to suffer us sit in judgment on their respective claims to in this or that particular discovery; to balance mathematical skill of one against the experimental dexterity of another, or the philosophical acumen a third. So long as "one star differs from another in glory,"-so long as there shall exist varieties, or even incompatibilities of excellence,-so long will the admiration of mankind be found sufficient for all who merit it.
John Herschel
It was good of Friedrich Nietzsche to declare God dead - I declare that he has never been born. It is a created fiction, an invention, not a discovery. Do you understand the difference between invention and discovery? A discovery is about truth, an invention is manufactured by you. It is man-manufactured fiction.
Rajneesh
Actually Rogers Fry's Vision and Design [1920] was the most lucky discovery for me. I came on it by chance while looking for another book in the Leeds Reference Library. Fry in his essay on 'Negro Sculpture' stressed the 'three-dimensional realization' that characterized African art and its 'truth to material'. More, Fry opened the way to other books and to the realization of the British museum. That was really the beginning.
Henry Moore
I find myself lined up with the surrealists because Surrealism means freedom for the creative side of man, for surprise & discovery & life, for an opening out & widening of mans consciousness, for changing life & against conserving worn out traditions, for variety not a uniformity, for opening not closing.
Henry Moore
My work is in a complete transformation. Lately, in my studio in Amsterdam, 'beings' re-emerge more and more, but I have repainted all the canvases that I have brought with me [from Amsterdam to Paris]. It is matter itself. On the canvas, no discovery, no personal drama, no submission to a rhythm.... freed from 'Victory Boogiewoogie' [title of the last work of Piet Mondrian, 1944], bepop, bepop, we free ourselves from rhythm, we are not there yet, but it is coming... Now I paint stains, bigger stains, colours endlessly reapplied one upon the other, I scrape and I put down new stains of colour unto nothing remains but one great plane, concentrated and linked at the same time, suddenly a vivid red or yellow and the canvas and being merge.
Karel Appel
Rutherford's discovery was the beginning of the science that came to be called nuclear physics. ... The projectiles that he used to explore the nucleus were particles produced in the disintegration of radium ... discovered by Marie Curie in 1898. The particles are helium nuclei that are emitted at high speed when radium atoms decay ... The twenty years between 1909 and 1929 were the era of tabletop nuclear physics. ... Small and simple experiments were sufficient to establish the basic laws of nuclear physics.
Freeman Dyson
Speaking purely for myself, I can say that it was my very acute feeling for the matière, for the substance of painting, which pushed me into thinking about the possibilities of the medium. I wanted to create a kind of substance by means of brush-work. But that is the kind of discovery which one makes gradually, though once a beginning had been made other discoveries follow. Thus it was that I subsequently began to introduce sand, sawdust and metal filings into my pictures. For I suddenly saw the extent to which colour is related to the substance... So my great delight was the 'material' character which I could give to my pictures by introducing these extraneous elements. In short, they provided me with a means of getting further away from idealism in 'representing' the things with which I was concerned.
Georges Braque
The experience or the vision is the artist's counterpart to the scientific discovery of a principle or law. What the scientist does when he discovers a new law is to give a new ordering to observed facts. The artist is engaged in a similar task. He gives new meaning to our experience and organizes it in a different way due to his perception of subtler qualities in reality.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
The recognition of certain basic impossibilities has laid the foundations of some major principles of physics and chemistry; similarly, recognition of the impossibility of understanding living things in terms of physics and chemistry, far from setting limits to our understanding of life, will guide it in the right direction. And even if the demonstration of this impossibility should prove of no great advantage in the pursuit of discovery, such a demonstration would help to draw a truer image of life and man than that given us by the present basic concepts of biology.
Michael Polanyi
Our view of life must account for how we know life; biological theories must allow for their own discovery and employment. Theories of evolution must provide for the creative acts which brought such theories into existence. Beginning with our own embodiment our theory of knowledge must endorse the ways we manifestly transcend our embodiment by acts of indwelling and extension into more subtle and intangible realms of being, where we meet our ultimate ends.
Michael Polanyi
