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Exploration Quotes


"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 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."



"We were just looking at maps..."


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


"Learning voyage, the greatest adventure."


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



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


"I look forward to the day when the solar system becomes our collective backyard-explored not only with robots, but with the mind, body, and soul of our species."


"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."



"There are many going afar to marvel at the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the long courses of great rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the movements of the stars, yet they leave themselves unnoticed!"


"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."


"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."


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


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


"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?"



"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."


"My world had for some years been Lowood: my experience had been of its rules and systems; now I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils."


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



"Searching for a lost city is a particularly European obsession."


"But first whom shall we sendIn search of this new world, whom shall we findSufficient? Who shall tempt, with wand'ring feetThe dark unbottomed infinite abyssAnd through the palpable obscure find outHis uncouth way, or spread his aery flightUpborne with indefatigable wingsOver the vast abrupt, ere he arriveThe happy isle?"


"Adventure, opportunity and reward extend beyond our field of vision, and are made known to us only when we test our wings."


"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."


"Explore the deep ocean."


"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."


"Life is a sacred experiment."


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


"Life is a great adventure."


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


"Explore and experiment your lifetime on earth."


"It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man , more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. 'How do you get to West Egg village?' he asked helplessly. I told him. Ans as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He has casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood."


"Adults follow paths. Children explore."


"Life is a daring adventure. I am enjoying every bit of the joyful journey."



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


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


"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."


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



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


"We've gotta become the Martians. I'm a Martian - I tell you to become Martians. And we've gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever."



"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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