Quotes About Exploration

In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again,

In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?

the Isle of Wight, with occasional visits to

A line from one of my 1997 columns - 'Do one thing every day that scares you' - is now widely attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, though I have yet to see any evidence that she ever said it and I don't believe she did. She said some things about fear, but not that thing.

With how many things are we on the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries.

I doubt if there are many normal women who can resist looking at houses. I believe, in fact, that when a house is up for sale more than half the people who look over it are not prospective buyers, but merely ladies who cannot resist exploring someone else's house.

Children ask me sometimes what book I'd take to a desert island, but I think I couldn't go to a desert island unless it had a library.

Take chances, make mistakes. That's how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.

We travellers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what has been said before us, we are dull and have observed nothing. If we tell anything new, we are laughed at as fabulous and romantic.

I had a love affair with books, with the characters and their worlds. Books kept me company

Art is a process, not a product.

I don't want to have all the answers, just the right questions.

Biologically and intellectually, reading allows the species to go "beyond the information given" to create endless thoughts most beautiful and wonderful.

If attention in the young child, which is spasmodic and exploratory by nature, becomes all the more attenuated because of constant input, those of us who are researchers have to figure out the downstream effects on memory and other aspects of cognitive development.

That is the purpose of museums, of course. One does not go merely to collect facts and souvenirs and picture post cards, but to enlarge one's notion of all that has been, and all that is, and all that might be. In this way we begin to understand what part each of us was born to play in the marvelous tale of existence.

To do something familiar and succeed is no surprise, but to try something new and fail--why, that is the start of an adventure.

An open mind lets ideas out, as well as in" -Agatha Swanburne

You'll find it in the last place you look, so, for heaven's sake, keep looking until you find it!

Navigation, you see, is not just a problem for sailors. Everyone must go adventuring sooner or later, yet finding one's way home is not easy. Just like the North Star and all its whirling, starry brethren, a person's idea of where 'home' is remains in perpetual motion, one's whole life long. Home was more than a house, even if the house was very grand.

Within reason" is not the sort of place one can easily find on a map; in fact, its location may vary considerably from one day to the next.

Penelope was in favor of new experiences, as long as they did not upset the digestion

If you want fresh ideas in your head, get some fresh mud on your boots.