Top 52 Eureka Quotes & Sayings

Your best ideas, those eureka moments that turn the world upside down, seldom come when you're juggling emails, rushing to meet the 5 P.M. deadline or straining to make your voice heard in a high-stress meeting. They come when you're walking the dog, soaking in the bath or swinging in a hammock.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'

The cliché of the 'Eureka!' moment easily obscures the doubt and uncertainty that are also part of the discovery process.

Oh yeah - you have to write every day. Or every weekday. Because writing is a job. It's not eureka moments over and over. It's grueling work, panning for gold. You just keep at it and eventually you get a few grains. Or flakes. Or whatever gold looks like in rivers. Or maybe it's like fishing. Who cares? You just have to do it every day because you never know which day is going to be your productive day.

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.

I always have homemade chicken stock in the refrigerator. I'll reduce it, maybe add a little cream and a few shallots. Before you know it, eureka! It's the best.

I don't believe in the sort of "Eureka!" moment idea. I think it's a myth. I'm very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that problem for a long time.

There's nothing like the eureka moment of knocking off a song that didn't exist before - I won't compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.

In many competitive worlds like luxury, things are done behind closed doors and with secrecy, so one day I had a eureka moment: for one weekend we show everything, full transparency, forget about business or commerce and showcase our work.

And Archimedes, as he was washing, thought of a manner of computing the proportion of gold in King Hiero's crown by seeing the water flowing over the bathing-stool. He leaped up as one possessed or inspired, crying, "I have found it! Eureka!".

Eureka! [I have found it!] On discovery of a method to test the purity of gold.

We insist on celebrating lone heroic path-finders, but even the most admired and the most successful inventors are part of a more remarkable supply chain of innovators who are largely ignored for the simpler mythology of one man or one eureka moment.

Eureka! Eureka! Supposed to have been his cry, jumping naked from his bath and running in the streets, excited by a discovery about water displacement to solve a problem about the purity of a gold crown.

I tape every game I can get my hands on. Every game that's on TV, I tape it. My daughter, Terry Hill, lives in Eureka, and she has a satellite dish, so she tapes what I can't get. I try to keep up with what everybody is doing, so if the phone rings, I'll be ready.

There are occasionally eureka moments - off the top of my head, maybe Darth Vader's theme, you know, the imperial march.

A brilliant mind having a eureka moment could not create an Intel microprocessor containing a billion transistors any more than one person could dream up a Boeing 787 from scratch.

Once you put bacon into a salad it's no longer a salad, it just becomes a game of find the bacon in the lettuce. It's like you're panning for gold, hmmmmm, EUREKA!

Work grows out of other work, and there are very few eureka moments

I was working with these very long-chain ... extended-chain polymers, where you had a lot of benzene rings in them. ... Transforming a polymer solution from a liquid to a fiber requires a process called spinning. ... We spun it and it spun beautifully. It [Kevlar] was very strong and very stiff-unlike anything we had made before. I knew that I had made a discovery. I didn't shout "Eureka!" but I was very excited, as was the whole laboratory excited, and management was excited, because we were looking for something new. Something different. And this was it.

"Eureka" is Greek for "This bath is too hot."

As software engineers trained to turn ambiguity into absolutes and fuzzy requirements into ones and zeros, we had a 'eureka' moment when we realized that our training had broader, real-world applications.

Finding God in all things is not an 'empirical eureka.' When we desire to encounter God, we would like to verify him immediately by an empirical method. But you cannot meet God this way...A contemplative attitude is necessary: it is the feeling that you are moving along the good path of understanding and affection toward things and situations. Profound peace, spiritual consolation, love of God, and love of all things in God-this is the sign that you are on this right path.

Eureka, Eureka! (I found it, I found it!).

'Eureka' moments are very, very rare in my experience. It normally takes several weeks of experiments to tease out the truth, even when you have a really pretty good idea of what is going on.

It always happened like this: he would look and look for the keys to Satan’s Hearse and then finally he’d just give up and say, “Fine. I’ll take the fugging bus,” and on his way out the door, he’d see the keys. Keys show up when you reconcile yourself to the bus; Katherines appear when you start to disbelieve the world contains another Katherine; and, sure enough, the Eureka moment arrived just as he began to accept it would never come.

Not only does the title 'We're Here' highlight the fact that me, Shangela, and Eureka are here, but we as a queer community, we were already here. We were already existing in your space before these drag queens showed up with a big purse bus.

Work grows out of other work, and there are very few eureka moments.

Sometimes, at a certain point, the painting seems to have painted itself without my help - what I have called the 'eureka' moment when a sudden daring intervention has worked a miracle.

Archimedes said Eureka, Cos in English he weren't too aversed in, when he discovered that the volume of a body in the bath, is equal to the stuff it is immersed in, That is the law of displacement, Thats why ships don't sink, Its a shame he weren't around in 1912, The Titanic would have made him think.

'Eureka' was very bad timing. The early 1980s: Reagan and Thatcher were in, greed was good, and here was a film about the richest man in the world who still couldn't be happy. Politically and sociologically, it was out of step.

For each of my novels, I've had something of a eureka moment of deciding what world I want to set it in - Wall Street, the pop-music industry, Harvard - and what the very vague contours of the narrative might be (which typically get changed a lot through the writing process).

This is Reagan country. Yeah! And perhaps it was destiny that the man who went to California`s Eureka College would become so woven within and interlinked to the Golden State.

I love dipping into worlds at a fast and furious pace. A little glimpse allows the audience to put together the rest of that world in their brain. I love sketches that require the audience to piece together the comedic engine themselves. Give them all the information but not tell them what the scene is about so they can have that eureka moment of, "Oh my God, he's only used to the way urban students pronounce their names. That's what's going on here.".

What's lovely about 'Eureka' is that it's a sci-fi show, but it's not monsters from outer space; it's not craziness from outer space. It's just about this community of people and what they do. These geniuses have sometimes done wonderful things and sometimes created global warming. It has this wonderful left-of-center sense of humor.

The creative act always requires a stepping back. It's called the incubation period. The incubation period - one of the four phases of creativity - is when you're not consciously thinking of a problem, and you're letting it marinate. So this is why you hear time and again, people saying they had that "Eureka" moment in the bath, like Archimedes, or in the shower, or while going for a walk or in a coffeehouse.

Eureka! - I have found it!

The eureka moment is two reasons why the output-based standard should be adopted: common sense and accountability. Input-based standards don't encourage energy diversity; they don't create any incentives; they don't produce solar, hydro, nuclear.

This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton's famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.

In science, the most exciting expression isn’t ‘Eureka!’ It’s ‘Huh?’

With 'Taxi Driver,' I had this eureka moment. I realized that acting could be much more than what I had been doing. I had to build a character that wasn't me.

'The Office' is clearly the funniest show on TV. But I can't live without watching 'Eureka.' It's my favorite show of all time, and I watch it constantly on my iPod.

When I realised, on 'The Straits,' that physical work in the theatre takes much longer than directing scenes, it was like a eureka moment. If you want to work physically, you have to accommodate it, and it takes a disproportionate amount of time.

Most of us have one big idea at some point in our lives. That Eureka! moment. It comes to us all in different ways, often by chance of serendipity.

I'm wired with a little bit of self-loathing, not that kind of self-loathing that paralyzes me, but it's there. The things I'm most loved for are sometimes the things that annoy me, not my favorite stuff, but those flashes of genius moments, they're called, I rarely see them as a one eureka light bulb idea.

Creativity and insight almost always involve an experience of acute pattern recognition: the eureka moment in which we perceive the interconnection between disparate concepts or ideas to reveal something new.

I was very excited to do 'The Witches.' It was with one of my favorite directors, Nick Roeg, and I loved his work from 'Don't Look Now' and 'Eureka.' So I was very excited to work with him. The story was a very subversive fairy tale by Roald Dahl, and a fantastic part.

I'm spending more time at this library in four days than I did at the Eureka College Library in four years.

You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be.

However, the mind has an amazing ability to continue worrying away at a problem all on its own, so that when the "Eureka!" comes it is as mysterious as if it were God speaking.

So once I thought of the villain with a sense of humor, I began to think of a name and the name "the Joker" immediately came to mind. There was the association with the Joker in the deck of cards, and I probably yelled literally, 'Eureka!' because I knew I had the name and the image at the same time.

This is, if not a lifetime process, it's awfully close to it. The writer broadens, becomes deeper, becomes more observant, becomes more tempered, becomes much wiser over a period time passing. It is not something that is injected into him by a needle. It is not something that comes on a wave of flashing, explosive light one night and say, 'Huzzah! Eureka! I've got it!' and then proceeds to write the great American novel in eleven days. It doesn't work that way. It's a long, tedious, tough, frustrating process, but never, ever be put aside by the fact that it's hard.

Eureka! (I have found it!).