Quotes About Exploration

Another important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to this liking.

Only then did he understand that he really wanted to know nothing about El Ga'a beyond the fact that it was isolated and unfrequented, that it was precisely those things he had been trying to ascertain about it.

There was earth inside them, and they dug.

Reality is not simply there, it does not simply exist: it must be sought out and won.

Serious circumstances remind us that the difficulty of finding the truth is no excuse for not looking.

Childhood is built on bad decision-making.

You can go anywhere in books

In hacking, like painting, work comes in cycles. Sometimes you get excited about a new project and you want to work sixteen hours a day on it. Other times nothing seems interesting.

A mountaintop is not simply an elevation, but an island, a world within a world, a place out of place.

Wildness is not found but revealed.

We need a dream-world in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit.

I find myself only by losing myself.

Hope isn't an abstract theory about where human aspirations end and the impossible begins; it's a never-ending experiment, continually expanding the boundaries of the possible.

A man walks down the street. It's a street in a strange world. Maybe it's the third world. Maybe it's his first time around. He doesn't speak the language. He holds no currency. He is a foreign man. He is surrounded by the sound, sound of cattle in the marketplace, scatterlings and orphanages. He looks around, around he sees angels in the architecture spinning in infinity and he says, Amen and Hallelujah!

Sometimes the best catalyst for local responsibility is actually taking pilgrimages to other local places.

Reading made me a traveler; travel sent me back to books.

Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars... Anything is possible on a train...

Solitary people make the best travellers

I wanted something altogether wilder, the clumsier romance of strangeness.

So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.

Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.

The Swahili word safari means journey, it has nothing to do with animals, someone 'on safari' is just away and unobtainable and out of touch.

To travel unconnected, away from anyone's gaze or reach, is bliss