Quotes About Exploration

I hear beyond the range of sound, I see beyond the range of sight, New earths, and skies and seas around. —

It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves...The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men and so with the paths which the mind travels.

A howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling. -

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

It matters not where or how far you travel,--the farther commonly the worse,--but how much alive you are.

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.

Now comes good sailing.

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in the Wildness is the preservation of the World.

Live free, child of the mist—and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist.

It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time.

have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot.

Writing your name can lead to writing sentences. And the next thing you'll be doing is writing paragraphs, and then books. And then you'll be in as much trouble as I am!

Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.

There is a low mist in the woods— It is a good day to study lichens.

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.

In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us.

I walk out into a Nature such as the old prophets and poets, Manu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America: neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.

When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now

we think that if rail-fences are pulled down, and stone-walls piled up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If you are chosen town-clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer: but you may go to the land of infernal fire nevertheless. The universe is wider than our views of it.

We might climb a tree, at least.

If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.

If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon.