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Exploration Quotes


"I like curiosity. It's a mind game, not a necessity."


"Suddenly I came out of my thoughts to notice everything around me again-the catkins on the willows, the lapping of the water, the leafy patterns of the shadows across the path. And then myself, walking with the alignment that only comes after miles, the loose diagonal rhythm of arms swinging in synchronization with legs in a body that felt long and stretched out, almost as sinuous as a snake when you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains."



"Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges -- Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!"


"You ought to explore, search and seek the unlimited possibilities in life."


"The lack of information is what makes one go to the desert in search of some seafood."


"In the midst of our struggle to find out who we are, there are infinite possibilities for beauty, and hope, and wonder, and love."


"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."


"In that case, on behalf of Earthlife, I urge that, with full knowledge of our limitations, we vastly increase our knowledge of the Solar System and then begin to settle other worlds."


"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."


"There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by. I have listened to accounts by such travelers in which every road number was remembered, every mileage recalled, and every little countryside discovered. Another kind of traveler requires to know in terms of maps exactly where he is pin-pointed at every moment, as though there were some kind of safety in black and red lines, in dotted indications and squirming blue of lakes and the shadings that indicate mountains. It is not so with me. I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found, nor much identification from shapes which symbolize continents and states."


"I'll be off exploring, searching for those out-of-bounds places where dreams exist."


"Go where imagination takes you-- not where others have gone before."



"You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore."


"I think young people should travel and travel often to other countries... like I do."


"Writing evinces the soul of an active mind and every era produced persons whom devoted their being to exploring the mysteries of life, seeking to discern answers pertaining how to resolve the complexities and paradoxes of life."



"The pursuit of illusion is not about studying for prizes, or for study's sake. There's no right or wrong, no pass or fail."



"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..."


"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."


"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."


"Learning voyage, the greatest adventure."


"Life is a great adventure."


"The trip changed all that. Stirring the murk of a life ill-fitting, Something More was perceptible though without name or form. Something More was the genesis of a map, not one handed to me but rendered with each step taken, a skill seasoned by a cruise gone bad."



"The world you see, nature's greatest and most glorious creation, and the human mind which gazes and wonders at it, and is the most splendid part of it, these are our own everlasting possessions and will remain with us as long as we ourselves remain. So, eager and upright, let us hasten with bold steps wherever circumstances take us, and let us journey through any countries whatever: there can be no place of exile within the world since nothing within the world is alien to men."


"I make no apology about stirring the depths - every human longs to swim under water and see what lurks beneath ..."


"The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away."


"Each person is a vast territory of undiscovered mystery as nebulous and uncharted as the deepest oceans and expanses of space."


"Why travel to the Moon or Mars if we only continue our wars there with Russia or China or Africa? Why build rockets at all? For fun? For adventure? Or is this the same process that sends the salmons back upstream year after year to spawn and die - a subliminal urge in mankind to spread, in self-preservation, to the stars? Are we then secretly fearful that one day the sun might freeze and the the earth grow cold or the sun explode in a terrific thermal cataclysm and burn down our house of cards?"


"Sometimes we have absolutely no idea where we are, we need the smallest clue to show us where to begin."


"Where did you live before you came here?' I asked. 'The moon,' he said smoothly. 'We left because the place had no atmosphere."


"In mountaineering, if we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story."


"Explore the deep ocean."



"We were just looking at maps..."


"Life is a sacred experiment."


"Explore new sacred land."


"You are the greatest undiscovered adventure of your lifetime."


"Explore and experiment your lifetime on earth."


"Life is a worthwhile adventure."


"Pessimists never go on a voyage of discovery, equally so they never leave the shoreline in search of new horizons."



"Muscat is like a mind-altering drug. A stroll in its streets is like getting drunk for the first time."


"Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go."


"Dream to reach the stars, awaken to reach the edge of the universe."


"Part of what makes roads, trails and paths so unique as built structures is that they cannot be perceived as a whole all at once by a sedentary onlooker. They unfold in time as one travels along them, just as a story does as one listens or reads, and a hairpin turn is like a plot twist, a steep ascent a building of suspense to the view at the summit, a fork in the road an introduction of a new storyline, arrival the end of the story. Just as writing allows one to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to trace the route of the absent. Roads are a record of those who have gone before and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there."


"I've made it my mission to discover that which is off the beaten track. Somewhere in the undergrowth of the impossible."


"Ride your rainbow from end to end, enjoy each hue, seek ii'ts legend."


"You do not have to know which path you must take. That's not how life works. You simply must be curious and daring enough to take a step into the unknown. That's how you come to know."


"When you travel, somehow, the world gets both bigger and smaller, simultaneously."



"Explorers like to pretend that they are a select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship."


"We are always searching for a cave to fit in."
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