Quotes About Exploration

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth. —Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. —Neil Armstrong

They seek the edges, because it is the edges that ultimately lead us. A wise person does not fear the edges and fringes, but studies them. Indeed, he or she is often in them, working to make change happen.

The real trick is you have to forge your way straight ahead through the trees where there is no path.

There's a fork in the road. It seems like there are only two choices. It seems like the task is to figure out which way to go, left or right, forward or back, deeper or safer, but in fact any of those choices is easy compared to the real trick. The real trick is you have to forge your way straight ahead through the trees where there is no path.

Our road trip makes me see that needing help doesn't mean there aren't other places to get it besides home, other people who can provide it besides family, that having limits doesn't mean I cannot—must not, maybe—bewitch and bewilder, range far and wander wide and wild. For home is like black holes—no matter how small, no matter how humble, they capture everything in range and trap it inside. The only way to escape their draw is to be far enough away.

They say in old stories that you can't discover new lands without losing sight of the shore for a long time.

Byrd at the South Pole

We are crayons and lunchboxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds.

What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.

In uncharted territory, we need new thinking, new ways of processing intense emotions, and new behavioral choices.

Windsurfing, the sound of the word contains all the mystery of a solitary buoy in the fog, echoing across the water at the end of the day.

I took up windsurfing to explore my own courage.

I took to the Bodleian library as to a lover and ... would sit long hours in Bodley's arms to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books.

Most intelligent men and women like to go forth into the world and stalk their own prey, choose their own mirrors of dysfunction . . . .

I've nursed a lifelong love affair with movement, straying ever farther from those I love most. But somewhere along the way, it dawned on me that I was always traveling with family - because the act of travel, to the extent that it separates us from our relatives, also extends, manifests, multiplies, and completes family.

Making the journal equal to the journey is simply a matter of shifting your intention: you're no longer traveling and keeping a log on the side, but embarking with a dual purpose.

For my money, this is the highest purpose of journaling. A travelogue enables you to look inward while studying the unfamiliar scenes around you,

In fact, there's nothing like travel to swing wide all the artistic channels,

the trip itself may have so far gone smoothly,

Serendipity. Look for something, find something else, and realize that what you've found is more suited to your needs than what you thought you were looking for.

Books, books, books in all their aspects, in form and spirit, their physical selves and what reading releases from their hieroglyphic pages, in their sight and smell, in their touch and feel to the questing hand, and in the intellectual music which they sing to the thoughtful brain and loving heart, books are to me the best of all symbols, the realest of all reality.

I wonder which was more frightened among old tribes -- those bursting out of their darkness of woods upon all the space of light, or those from the open tiptoeing into the forests.

Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.