Quotes About Exploration

Experimental innovators like Rock, Brin and Page, Bezos, and Beethoven don't analyze new ideas too much too soon, try to hit narrow targets on unknown horizons, or put their hopes into one big bet. Instead of trying to develop elaborate plans to predict the success of their endeavors, they do things to discover what they should do.

entrepreneurs do not try to avoid errors or surprises. They seek to learn from them, just as chefs often arrive at new recipes through improvisation.

Thus, a key flaw with the top-down, central planning approach is how limited it is in allowing us to be limber and able to discover new ways of doing things.

No one can take their eye off their core business or responsibilities, but anyone can spend a portion of their time and energies using little bets to discover, test, and improve new ideas.

During portages, each voyageur hauled two 90-pound packets of pelts on his back—a staggering 180 pounds, one packet suspended from a tumpline around his forehead, the other resting atop it on his back—a half mile at a time between designated rest stops, then returned for additional loads. Some of the portages went on for ten miles, and a notorious one lasted for forty.

To ask for a map is to say, "Tell me a story.

A story or novel is a kind of map because, like a map, it is not a world, but it evokes one (or at least one, for each reader.

The purpose of a story or poem, unlike that of a diary, is not to record our experience but to create a context for, and to lead the reader on, a journey.

ARTISTIC CREATION is a voyage into the unknown.

In the nineteenth century, maps often indicated watering holes for horses.

As readers, we are content, even delighted, to be lost, in the sense that we are both absorbed and uncertain of where we are or where we are going, as long as we feel confident we are following a guide who has not only the destination but our route to it clearly in mind.

A prerequisite for finding our way through any story or novel is to be lost: the journey can't begin until we've been set down in a place somehow unfamiliar.

We may become the first species to spread beyond the limits of the Earth and colonize other planets.

And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.

Inspiration comes and goes, creativity is the result of practice.

Centuries of travel yore suggest that when we no longer know where to turn, our real journey has just begun.

Uncover what you long for and you will discover who you are.

What legendary travelers have taught us since Pausanius and Marco Polo is that the art of travel is the art of seeing what is sacred.

The wandering French essayist Jacques Reda reminds himself before he leaves his Paris apartment every Sunday morning for his long strolls around the city to see one new thing. . . . he has learned to notice what others ignore.

Winning is about moving into the unknown and creating something new.

Now that all of our children were out of the house, she was looking forward to creating a new, more fulfilling life. So was I—or so I thought. I explored other interests, including giving speeches on leadership.

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it. GEORGE MOORE

Scientists, according to [Francis] Bacon, should not be like ants, busy doing mindless practical tasks, nor like spiders, weaving tenuous philosophical webs, but like bees, mining nature for her goodness and using it to make useful things.

Our bodies are as unknown to us as the ocean, both familiar and strange; the sea inside ourselves.