Joy of Discovery Quotes

What induces a child to learn but his delight in knowing?

We need kids to remind us of how incredible this world is. People are increasingly losing their childhoods too soon, and that's a danger. There's a prophesy somewhere that at a certain point in history, children will be gray. It's weird to think about, but it's possible.

Growing up, I always loved working with people. I love playing with people and having that moment of discovering something different. I believe in the magic of what music is.

It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.

I get up, and boy, I can't wait to paint and study music and keep learning. I just love it.

I had a teacher in Paris, who said that if an actor forgot what it's like to play as a child he shouldn't be an actor. I've always loved being with children. It's marvellous to see the fresh ways they see the world. Watching them look at a tree or a river helps you to understand something that's very important.

Does the pursuit of truth give you as much pleasure as before? Surely it is not the knowing but the learning, not the possessing but the acquiring, not the being-there but the getting there that afford the greatest satisfaction. If I have exhausted something, I leave it in order to go again into the dark. Thus is that insatiable man so strange: when he has completed a structure it is not in order to dwell in it comfortably, but to start another.

As my old professor Carl Sagan said so often, 'When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.’ And I base my beliefs on the information and the process that we call science. It fills me with joy to make discoveries every day of things I’ve never seen before. It fills me with joy to know that we can pursue these answers. It is an astonishing thing that we are — you and I are one of the ways the universe knows itself.

I think one of the reasons we have children is to believe everything all over again. And I'm not talking Santa, here, either.

And yet we constantly reclaim some part of that primal spontaneity through the youngest among us, not only through their sorrow and anger but simply through everyday discoveries, life unwrapped. To see a child touch the piano keys for the first time, to watch a small body slice through the surface of the water in a clean dive, is to experience the shock, not of the new, but of the familiar revisited as though it were strange and wonderful.

What would make me happiest is if kids read these books [Bink & Gollie] and think: there is so much to love in the world; and words are so much fun.

Curiosity, earnest research to learn the hidden laws of nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they unfolded to me, are among the earliest sensations I can remember.

A child is a life that has not gone too far away from the Creator. Know a child to know life.

Children add to the wonder of being alive.

The happiness even of the naturalist depends in some measure upon his ignorance, which still leaves him new worlds of this kind to conquer. He may have reached the very Z of knowledge in the books, but he still feels half ignorant until he has confirmed each bright particular with his eyes.

We've become so accustomed to teaching to the tests that we've forgotten about a child's joy of discovery.

In friendship, as in love, we are often more happy from the things we are ignorant of than from those we are acquainted with.

For me, this world of questions and the provisional, this chase after an answer that was always put off to the next day, all that was euphoric. I lived in the future.

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.

The real value of science is in the getting, and those who have tasted the pleasure of discovery alone know what science is. A problem solved is dead. A world without problems to be solved would be devoid of science.

Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing, and the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase.

My advice is not to aim for prizes and awards. We are in this for the joy of research, the fascination, the love of science. That's the reward, really.

He has the common feeling of his profession. He enjoys a statement twice as much if it appears in fine print, and anything that turns up in a footnote... takes on the character of divine revelation.

I was really, really, really enthusiastic as a kid. I was up for anything. I was hugely into music and theatre. I was a big musical theatre kid; I loved reading.

A single day is sufficient for a man to discover what happiness is.