Gradual Discovery Quotes

Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

The book of nature is a fine and large piece of tapestry rolled up, which we are not able to see all at once, but must be content to wait for the discovery of its beauty, and symmetry, little by little, as it graduallly comes to be more and more unfolded, or displayed.

Everyone wants to pretend like they sprang out of the ground with an Animal Collective record in their hands and a David Bowie haircut, and that's just not the case. You discover these things gradually.

We wait for the tortoises to come. We wait for that lady who walks them. That’s how art works. It’s never a jackrabbit, or a racehorse. It’s the tortoises that hold all the secrets. We’ve got to be patient enough to wait for them.

The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.

I work like a labourer on a farm or in a vineyard. Things come to me slowly. My vocabulary of forms, for instance, has not been the discovery of a day. It took shape in spite of myself... That is why I am always working on a hundred different things at the same time.

People think of these eureka moments and my feeling is that they tend to be little things, a little realisation and then a little realisation built on that.

Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.

The ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room.

The secrets of nature are concealed; her agency is perpetual, but we do not always discover its effects; time reveals them from age to age; and although she is always the same in herself, she is not always equally well known.

I never want to sort of put all the cards on the table all at once, because that's somehow there's always a journey to go on. There's always something to be revealed, in my mind, about characters.

It's like with a girl: it's more fun to meet and slowly, gradually learn things about each other. A little mystery is always nice and it's interesting to still learn new things about someone you are involved with.

You cannot see the Grand Canyon in one view, as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted, but to see it, you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths.

No good book, or good thing of any sort, shows its best face at first.

[Science is] piecemeal revelation.

Our alleged facts might be true in all kinds of ways without contradicting any truth already known. I will dwell now on only one possible line of explanation, - not that I see any way of elucidating all the new phenomena I regard as genuine, but because it seems probable I may shed a light on some of those phenomena. All the phenomena of the universe are presumably in some way continuous; and certain facts, plucked as it were from the very heart of nature, are likely to be of use in our gradual discovery of facts which lie deeper still.