Quotes About Exploration

I miss my family, and I like being a tourist when I go back.

If you want to go somewhere new, you have to throw out the tired, old map and stop traveling the same road to the same dead end.

Boredom is only for boring people with no imagination.

when you're a little kid. Everything is a sparkling wonder.

I figured we'd just do what we always do: stick our noses in where they don't belong and see what happens.

I liked books - the respite and privacy of them - books about plants and the formation of ice and the business of world wars. Whenever I sank into them I felt free.

Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tide of rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought." We are spiritual beings. But for many of us, malnutrition of the soul is a plague of modern life.

Thrill to the names—El Dorado, Searchlight, Medicine Bow, Mesa Verde, Tombstone, Durango, Hole in the Wall, Lost Trail Pass, Nez Perce National Forest. Active names, implying that something consequential is going on: the Wind River Range, the Magic Valley, the River of No Return, the Painted Desert, Wolf Point, Paradise, Death Valley, the Crazy Mountains.

It still scares people driving cars named Expedition and Outlander... Throughout the Great Plains, a visitor passes more nothing than something. Or so it seems.

Here in the corner attic of America, two hours' drive from a rain forest, a desert, a foreign country, an empty island, a hidden fjord, a raging river, a glacier, and a volcano is a place where the inhabitants sense they can do no better, nor do they want to.

I'll take the advice of Labre, the patron saint of wandering souls, who grew up not far from here: 'There is no way. The way is made by walking.

Productivity is for robots. What humans are going to be really good at is asking questions, being creative, and experiences." Kevin Kelly

Creativity is an infinite resource. The more you spend,the more you have.

The fishing is best where the fewest go,

take things like playfulness and purposelessness very seriously. . . . This is not meant to be light, but I think I would have somehow encouraged myself to let go a little bit more and hang in there and not pretend to know where this is all going. You don't need to know where it's all going.

we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) "the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it." We'd love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place.

Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas. —PAULA POUNDSTONE

there has never been a better time for testing the uncommon.

It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot. —PAUL THEROUX, To the Ends of the Earth

And if you say you're not creative, look at how much you're missing out on just because you've told yourself that. I think creativity is one of the greatest gifts that we're born with that some people don't cultivate, that they don't realize it could be applied to literally everything in their lives.

It is fatal to know too much at the outset. Boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as the novelist who is over certain of his plot." –Paul Theroux

The worst that could happen wasn't crashing and burning, it was accepting terminal boredom as a tolerable status quo.

Follow your intellectual curiosity over whatever is "hot" right now. If your curiosity ever leads you to a place where society eventually wants to go, you'll get paid extremely well.

To find the right things, we'll need to go to the garden.