Charles Kingsley Quotes

As soon as I did, everything, the whole room, just clicked.

It was about three o'clock at night when the final result of the calculation [which gave birth to quantum mechanics] lay before me ... At first I was deeply shaken ... I was so excited that I could not think of sleep. So I left the house ... and awaited the sunrise on top of a rock.

In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.

Do you know, Masha, how revelation comes? Like death. So sudden, though you knew all along it must occur. A revelation is always the end of something. It might even be cause for grief.

It's amazing in the blink of an eye you finally see the light.

Like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagrams of my motor. A thousand secrets of nature which I might have stumbled upon accidentally I would have given for that one which I had wrestled from her against all odds and at the peril of my existence.

Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm.

It was all so clear now. Like everything had been lost in darkness, and then the sun came out. Some moments are like that.

You can read ten books and finally come across one detail, and it's like, "now everything else makes sense. Now I know where I am."

When you make a breakthrough it is a moment of scientific exhilaration because you have been on this search and seem to have found it. But it is also a moment where I at least feel closeness to the creator in the sense of having now perceived something that no human knew before but God knew all along.

Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination.

I will reveal the secrets behind these doors.

That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.

A truth discovered always seems so plain and simple that we wonder why the discovery was so long delayed.

Minor things can become moments of great revelation when encountered for the first time.

I think we all want something to knock us on the head and change our lives.

When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light - you'll never forget it.

The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.

The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.

Throughout history there have been many other examples, similar to that of Haeckel, Huxley and the cell, where a key piece of a particular scientific puzzle was beyond the understanding of the age.

Eureka [I have found it]

There is nothing which is secret save it shall be revealed; there is no work of darkness save it shall be made manifest in the light; and there is nothing which is sealed upon the earth save it shall be loosed.

The Truth, sometimes not sought for, comes forth to the light.

Inspiration is a really hard thing to describe, but it's something that triggers your brain, like the first time I heard a certain guitar player that I loved or the first time that I saw a monster or the first time that I saw anything that really was an epiphany for me. It just stays with you your whole life.

In literature there was always an epiphany - a tingling moment, sometimes buried - the pearl around which the whole work formed.