Quotes About Exploration

To know which path to take, it helps to take a few wrong ones.

And yet we had done what so often happened in the proud history of geographic discovery. We had found paradise. And then we had set it on fire.

It turned out to be near impossible to stand in a library and not want to pull things from the shelves.

Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines." "Exactly. But you also have to know what you like. What to type into the metaphorical search box. And sometimes you have to try a few things before that becomes clear.

Well, what the fuck would an extraterrestrial life form want to come here for?

What if there are more than two roads diverging in the wood? What if there are more roads than trees? What if there is no end to the choices you could make? What would Robert Frost do then?

Be curious. Question everything. A present fact is just a future fiction.

To read, to seek, to know.

Where there were books, there was always the temptation to open them.

When you stay too long in one place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.

Every dead end and cul-de-sac helps us escape the maze. To know which path to take, it helps to take a few wrong ones.

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don't really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping. It is not where we are, but where we want to go, and all that. "Is there no way out of the mind?" Sylvia Plath famously asked.

An impossibility is just a possibility you don't understand yet.

Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

The purpose of science is to find out where the limits of possibility end. When we have achieved that – and we shall – there will be no more magic, no more superstition, there will just be what is.

On Earth you have to spend a lot of time traveling in between places, be it on roads or on rail tracks or in careers or relationships.

Your brain is open. Never let it be closed.

Every time I read a great book I felt I was reading a kind of map, a treasure map, and the treasure I was being directed to was in actual fact myself. But each map was incomplete, and I would only locate the treasure if I read all the books, and so the process of finding my best self was an endless quest. And books themselves seemed to me to reflect this idea. Which is why the plot of every book ever can be boiled down to 'someone is looking for something'.

A book is a map .... There will be times in your life when you will feel lost and confused. The way back to yourself is through reading. There is not a problem in existence that has not been eased, somewhere and at some time, by a book. ... The answers have all been written. And the more you read, the more you will know how to find your way through those difficult times.

It is so nice to be somewhere I don't know. To be somewhere new, when the world has felt so stale and familiar.

But where there were books, there was always the temptation to open them.

The fun is in the jumping, mon amie.' 'But what if it's in the landing?

Each of us has the power to enter a new world. All we have to do is change our mind.

A Camus quote came to her, right in the middle of it. I may have not been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.