Quotes About Exploration

The truth is something you must find out for yourself. It is like a voyage of discovery and you will meet many adventures along the way. Listen to people's opinions but in the end it must be for you to determine truth as you find it. Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882)

When on board H.M.S. 'Beagle,' as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America

I have kept every breed which I could purchase or obtain, and have been most kindly favoured with skins from several quarters of the world, more especially by the Hon. W. Elliot from India, and by the Hon. C. Murray from Persia.

Did man, after his first inroad into South America, destroy, as has been suggested, the unwieldy Megatherium and the other Edentata?

The natural history of this archipelago is very remarkable; it seems to be a little world within itself.

Alexander von Humboldt was the] greatest scientific traveller who ever lived.

There is nothing like geology; the pleasure of the first day's partridge shooting or first day's hunting cannot be compared to finding a fine group of fossil bones, which tell their story of former times with almost a living tongue. Charles Darwin, letter to his sister Catherine, 1834

to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest.

Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.

Days of yore when America was no more than a strip of land stretching a couple hundred miles west of the Atlantic and the rest was just a very compelling idea.

The road, they said, was a place apart, a country of its own ruled by no government but natural law, and its one characteristic was freedom.

He liked brown antiquated travel books describing trips that weren't possible anymore - explorations of the Western Hemisphere back when much of it was still unmapped.

She had made her way to a place where an entirely other order prevailed from what she had always known.

for a schoolroom without a physical atlas is like a needle without an eye)

The library was magical because every time I walked through the door, there were literally thousands of voices ready and willing to have a conversation with me. I walked through the door, stared at all those stacks and bindings, and whispered, Tell me a story.

Accelerating to speeds faster than light was, of course, impossible. General relativity had made that clear enough back in the twentieth century. However, since then a number of ways of circumventing the speed limit had turned up; by now, there were at least six different known methods of moving mass or information from A to B without going through c.

A historian who works for a bank: That's not the most likely background for someone who capers around the cosmos having adventures, is it?

Starships are all work and no fun.

Yes, Derek," I tell him, "we hauled you four thousand miles out of your comfort zone just so you could make a saving throw vs. Cthulhu. Happy now?

OF COURSE, SPACE travel isn't only about being stuffed into a claustrophobia-inducing cell, scared witless, trussed up in a restraint harness, and raped through every orifice for years on end. Because, you know, if that was all there was to it, there'd be a queue outside every travel agent.

They fuck hard and fast at too many gees, his docking hectocotylus locked tight inside her launch adapter.

You want to know what it's like to emigrate to Saturn system? Imagine spending six years in a straitjacket tied to the outside of a skyscraper, with only a couple dozen similar lunatics for company.

For my sins and because I discovered a wunch of bankers suffering from the syndrome to which we've assigned the keyword OPERA CAPE, I have been seconded to the shiny new exploration phase of DRESDEN RICE, and if you think that code name sounds like it has something to do with the V-word, have a cigar.

the fool's errand to the edge of the Beckenstein limit again