Quotes About Exploration

Ask dumb questions.

Did your mathematical studies ever reach to the quadratic equation, Stephen?' 'They did not reach to the far end of the multiplication table.

It would be strange if the weather-gage had to be explained to so old a sea-dog; though I must confess that there was a time when I confused it with that thing which creaks on the roof, showing which way the wind is blowing. Yet could you not obtain this valuable gage by some less arduous means than running a hundred miles and hiding behind a more or less mythical island which no one has ever seen, and that in the dark, a perilous proceeding if ever there was one?

I've come down from the mountains, with an ass-full of specimens...

Patrick O'Brian

Patrick O'Brian

Patrick O'Brian

There is nothing that interests me more than travel, I declare; and if I had had my health, I should have been a great traveller, a second–a second– St Paul? No, no. A second Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Patrick O'Brian

almighty,' said Killick. 'Stephen, I am going to take a turn,' said Jack, withdrawing from the table in a sly undulatory motion and darting through the door with hunched shoulders. 'Why they call this a crack frigate,' he said, swilling down a glass of water in his sleeping-cabin, 'I cannot for the life of me imagine: not a drop of coffee among two hundred and sixty men.

Patrick O'Brian

Patrick O'Brian

Patrick O'Brian

I am not master of words to tell you, Jack, the value of an exceedingly remote island to a naturalist, an uninhabited fertile volcanic island covered with a luxuriant vegetation, with no vile rats, dogs, cats, goats, swine, introduced by fools to destroy an Eden, an island untouched...

The map? I will first make it.

I am compelled into this country.

Don't be afraid of silly ideas.

Even when we want to be timid and play it safe, we should pause for a moment to imagine what we might be missing.

The principle of scientific inquiry should not be limited to merely the practical or the possible, explained Sighter. Only by investigating the unlikely and the unthought-of is the sum total of knowledge advanced.

Life is short. The world is big. It awaits your exploration. If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up way too much space.

He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.

Many days later another caravan was passing and a man saw something on top of the highest dune there. And when they went up to see, they found Outka, Mimouna and Aicha; they were still there, lying the same way as when they had gone to sleep. And all three of the glasses,' he held up his own little tea glass, 'were full of sand. That was how they had their tea in the Sahara.

Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.

The idea that at each successive moment he was deeper into the Sahara than he had been the moment before, that he was leaving behind all familiar things, this constant consideration kept him in a state of pleasurable agitation.