Quotes About Exploration

In these dark rooms I pass such listless days, I wander up and down looking for the windows - when a window opens there will be some relief. But there are no windows, or at least I cannot find them. And perhaps it's just as well. Perhaps the light would prove another torment. Who knows what new things it would reveal? (The Windows)

SEEING THE WORLD "In the fifties, when my mother began lobbying for a trip to Europe, my father, who had been brought to Missouri from the Ukraine when he was two, said, 'I been.' 

As long as a thing is unknown, it belongs to us in a way that well-known things do not. For we have the opportunity to fill the empty, unknown spaces for ourselves, and in them there is room for imagination and for hope.

Really believing in once upon a time. Believing that it will draw you in, take you with me to a place you've never been before.

Even the most straightforward of paths could turn out to be more complicated than it seemd at first.

Okay, so yours is not a map of blood. But can't you see? This is a map of love.

To whom does he owe ultimate re- sponsibility? Since Romanticism, we have expected the artist not to celebrate God, king, family, and established values but to break taboos, to explore his or her deepest, most socially forbidden self.

Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.

People only go to the places they have visited first in their minds.

Her biggest fault - perplexing to this day - is that Mother loves to pick trash. Its an adventure, she says. You never know what surprises you'll find

I can't wait to get out of the house. I can't wait to get out of here. I've been telling myself this all week. The 'getting out of here' part is unspecified, though. Maybe I simply want to get away from life

I don't know where I'm going, but I know I'm going somewhere.

There are a great many things I would do a study on if I had the time, materials and funding. It bothers me that I can't. I wonder if others are irked by this, this incessant drive to plumb a million things and the inability to delve adequately into any one of them.

A Terrestrial Paradise, an Amazon Island, abounding in gold and certainly 'infested with many griffins.

Abbey hopped off my handlebars

we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers

Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we've learned most of what we know. Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.

Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.

There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.

Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries.

There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.

If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.