Quotes About Exploration

A taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors

No man ever followed his genius til it misled him.

Direct your eye inward, and you'll find / A thousand regions in your mind / Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be / Expert in home-cosmography

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant.

I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees

It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.

Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it...At last we know not what it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think.

But man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little have been tried.

The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there.

The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours …but it is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.

SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, There goes a Sainte-Terrer, a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the wilderness.

Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state...

A traveller! I love his title. A traveler is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from–toward; it is the history of every one of us.

There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.

There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon—said Damodara, when his herds required new and larger pastures.

He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.

I was determined to know beans.

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows that surround it. We need the tonic of wildness...

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.

I have learned that the swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.

Every poet has trembled on the verge of science.