Quotes About Exploration

I love everything about motels. I can't help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open.

You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, "far removed from the seats of strife," as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.

Once he inserted a bodkin – a long needle of the sort used for sewing leather – into his eye socket and rubbed it around 'betwixt my eye and the bone4 as near to [the] backside of my eye as I could' just to see what would happen. What happened, miraculously, was nothing – at least, nothing lasting.

wanted to be puzzled and charmed, to experience the endless, beguiling variety of a continent where you can board a train and an hour later be somewhere where the inhabitants speak a different language, eat different foods, work different hours, live lives that are at once so different and yet so oddly similar. I wanted to be a tourist. But

From that original colony sprang seven names that still feature on the landscape: Roanoke (which has the distinction of being the first Indian word borrowed by English settlers), Cape Fear, Cape Hatteras, the Chowan and Neuse Rivers, Chesapeake, and Virginia. (Previously, Virginia had been called Windgancon, meaning what gay clothes you wear - apparently what the locals had replied when an early reconnoitering party had asked the place's name.)

we're going to be in the wilderness in three days. There won't be doughnut stores.

In 1606, a Spanish mariner named Luis Vaez de Torres sailed across the Pacific from South America and straight into the narrow channel (now called the Torres Strait) that separates Australia from New Guinea without having the faintest idea that he had just done the nautical equivalent of threading a needle.

the mightiest and most extensive mountain range on Earth was—mostly—under water.

Jean Chappe spent months travelling to Siberia by coach, boat and sleigh, nursing his delicate instruments over every perilous bump, only to find the last vital stretch blocked by swollen rivers, the result of unusually heavy spring rains, which the locals were swift to blame on him after they saw him pointing strange instruments at the sky. Chappe managed to escape with his life, but with no useful measurements.

You can't go to East Anglia and not visit Sutton Hoo. Well, you can, obviously, but you shouldn't.

Cook was a brilliant navigator and a conscientious observer, but he made one critical mistake on his first voyage: he took Australia's wet season for its dry one, and concluded that the country was more hospitable than it was.

The transit of Venus of 1769 finally allowed us to determine the distance from the Earth to the Sun: 149.59 million kilometres. A

I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.

We live on a planet that more or less has an infinite capacity to surprise.

Based on what we know now and can reasonably imagine, there is absolutely no prospect that any human being will ever visit the edge of our own solar system—ever.

well over a million years ago, some new, comparatively modern, upright beings left Africa and boldly spread out across much of the globe.

Pluto is about 40 AUs from us, the heart of the Oort cloud about fifty thousand. In a word, it is remote. But

to nonlocals

Just reaching the centre of our own galaxy would take far longer than we have existed as beings.

Stoically, Le Gentil packed up his instruments and set off for the nearest port, but en route he contracted dysentery and was laid up for nearly a year.

That's not because it would take too long to get there—though of course it would—but because even if you travelled outward and outward in a straight line, indefinitely and pugnaciously, you would never arrive at an outer boundary. Instead, you would come back to where you began (at which point, presumably, you would rather lose heart in the exercise and give up).

It was all a long time ago and at this stage we just don't know.

There is actually a certain value in not finding anything," he said. "It helps cosmologists to work out the rate at which galaxies are evolving.

failed to spot the caldera: virtually the whole park—2.2 million acres—was caldera.