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"Those who have never seen themselves surrounded on all sides by the sea can never possess an idea of the world, and of their relation to it."
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Exlpore more Exploration quotes
"There were mountains; there were valleys; there were streams. She climbed the mountains; roamed the valleys; sat on the banks of streams.....when, from the mountain-top, she beheld, far off, across the Sea of Marmara the plains of Greece, and made out (her eyes were admirable) the Acropolis with a white streak or two which must, she thought, be the Parthenon, her soul expanded with her eyeballs, and she prayed she might share the majesty of the hills, know the serenity of the plains, etc. etc., as all such believers do."
"If you travel in space for three years and come back, four hundred years will have passed on Earth. I am only an armchair astronomer, but I have the odd sense that I have returned from a journey to a world where nothing quite makes sense."
"Just a child is free to wander in one's father's garden, discovering little or big things; it is left to the seeker to grow unto the Nature of the Absolute."
"Even if the aliens are short, dour, and sexually obsessed-if they're here, I want to know about them."
"Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra... these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known..."
"The greatest danger to man in space was man himself."
"We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive; love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly on the dead; we'll open their letters, we'll read their journals, we'll go through their trash, hoping for a hint, a final word, an explanation, from those who have deserted us-who've left us holding the bag, which is often a good deal emptier than we'd supposed."
"Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end. It flung them like stones."
"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another til I drop."
"But ironically the believers have done worse in exploring the earth than sons of men who are not even believers have done."
Explore more quotes by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Man needs only a small patch of earth for his pleasures, and a smaller one still to rest beneath."
"Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome."
"We are so constituted that we believe the most incredible things; and, once they are engraved upon the memory, woe to him who would endeavour to efface them."
"The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honour or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool."
"A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision... But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant 'there' becomes the present 'here,' all is changed; we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness."
"If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be."
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