Quotes About Exploration

No doubt it is true that science cannot study God, but it hardly follows that God had to keep a safe distance from everything that scientists want to study.

To step off the reservation to question the rules of the larger society is to take a great risk, but perhaps also to find a great opportunity. We will never know how great the opportunity was if we are afraid to take the risk.

The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in the closet.

What makes me want to keep reading a nonfiction text is the encounter with a surprising, well-stocked mind as it takes on the challenge of the next sentence, paragraph

A young person still thinks it is possible–there is time enough–to become all things: athlete and aesthete, soldier and pacifist, anchorite and debauchee.

I would have followed Derek to the edge of the world, if he had wanted me to. And then perhaps we would have had to hold hands because it must be quite windy at the edge of the world.

San Francisco was invigorating. She looked about in utter delight.

using billion dollar satellites to find Tupperware in the woods,

The banal advice of writ in teachers is "write what you know," but the truth is, you don't know a place until you write it. "Write what you want to know" is more like it.

Most people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations: explore something, even if it's just a bookshelf.

My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible.

Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.

You go into the dark to get away from what you know, and if you go far enough, you realize, suddenly, that you'll never really make it back into the light.

If you grow up between cultures, if you get accustomed to traveling, it's easy to find yourself always on the outside of things, looking in. This can be ideal for a writer—or a spy; you've always got, analytically, a ticket out.

As Henry David Thoreau, one of the great explorers of his time, reminded himself in his journal, "It matters not where or how far you travel—the farther commonly the worse—but how much alive you are." Two

What if?" points in both directions.

We now have access, increasingly, to more and more cultures across the globe, and the result is that restlesness has gone global, and hopdfulness, and the sense of an answer being found somewhere else.

If they can't get to Europe, they'll find their way to a local theme-park Eiffel Tower. Even a place that we write off as "inauthentic," they realize, can arouse emotions that are entirely authentic.

Going nowhere was the grand adventure that made sense of everywhere else.

Nothing sets you (or at least me) free creatively," says the untamed film director and Monty Pythonite, Terry Gilliam, "like having a set of limitations to explore.

Aveva vent'anni e aveva bisogno di storie.

All has been done, each theme has been attack'd, And Authors' Heads are like a city sack'd!

Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things.

There is more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all. For any given reader, however dedicated he might be, such total abstention necessarily holds true for virtually everything that has been published, and thus in fact this constitutes our primary way of relating to books. We must not forget that even a prodigious reader never has access to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the books that exist.