logo

Quotes About Exploration

No se lo que puede llegar, pero sea lo que sea, iré hacia ello riéndome
~ Herman Melville
Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it.
~ Herman Melville
He loved books, never going to sea without a newly replenished library, compact but of the best.
~ Herman Melville
I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it — would they let me — since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.
~ Herman Melville
Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one;
~ Herman Melville
Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach.
~ Herman Melville
Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region
~ Herman Melville
Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations.
~ Herman Melville
What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of wailing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish.
~ Herman Melville
Call me Ishmael
~ Herman Melville
Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish.
~ Herman Melville
With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies
~ Herman Melville
Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings
~ Herman Melville
go on a whaling voyage; this
~ Herman Melville
for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
~ Herman Melville
By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid- and nobody is there!-appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of a man!
~ Herman Melville
Song of the Paddlers Dip, dip, in the brine our paddles dip, Dip, dip, the fins of our swimming ship! How the waters part, As on we dart; Our sharp prows fly, And curl on high, As the upright fin of the rushing shark, Rushing fast and far on his flying mark! Like him we prey; Like him we slay; Swim on the foe, Our prow a blow!
~ Herman Melville
This country of ours consists of pioneers, after
~ Herman Wouk
Be it determined, however, that each one this records is given by means of a man who, in line with his personal assertion, become only at one of the islands, and remained there however two weeks, slumbering every night on board his ship, and taking little child-glove excursions ashore within the sunlight hours, attended by an armed birthday celebration.
~ Herman, 1819-1891 Melville
when we follow our passions, we also risk escalating our emotional commitment to a new course of action before we have evidence that it will be doable.
~ Herminia Ibarra
Working identity is not just who we are. It is also who we are not. Being able to discard possibilities means we are making progress.
~ Herminia Ibarra
Sometimes the best way to find oneself is to flirt with many possibilities.
~ Herminia Ibarra
So much, then, for the fish.
~ Herodotus
Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.
~ Hilary Mantel