Quotes About Exploration

The child who knows his parents have sturdy end stops will not have to push and test to find the limits and boundaries.

The beaten path can be a busy and distracting place.

Richard Buckminster Fuller

I am thrilled to be alive at time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.

Books appear to be the most immediate instruments of speculative delight.

So it allows me to travel, I'll be doing that and running these great rivers and doing what I've done in the past without much purpose other than for the experience.

Just as the long night of the Arctic ends, the brilliant sunshine of Truth shall come again... and those who are of darkness shall fall in its Light... FOR I HAVE SEEN THAT LAND BEYOND THE POLE, THAT CENTER OF THE GREAT UNKNOWN.

Next morning, when I got up, the inside temperature was 30° below zero. The new arrangement was working quite nicely indeed.

Next morning, when I got up, the inside temperature was 300 below zero. The new arrangement was working quite nicely indeed.

Scientists say that it is impossible for any life to exist deep underground, that the Earth is solid through and through. However, at this point in time, no scientist has actually ever been far enough underground to prove their theories.

What did you ask at school today

Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Westwards along the basement, I let myself through a heavy door just beyond the dead giraffes. There was a notice on the wall that read "Departmental cock"--I never did find out what that meant.

I attempted in vain to calculate the size of the holdings on the shelves, floor on floor, only to boggle hopelessly, baffled by bibliographic boundlessness.

There is no final truth in palaeontology. Every new observer brings something of his or her own: a new technique, a new intelligence, even new mistakes. The past mutates. The scientist is on a perpetual journey into a past that can never be fully known, and there is no end to the quest for knowledge.

My contract had specified only that I 'should undertake work upon the fossil Arthropoda,' which left me free to roam through hundreds of millions of years. It might as well have said: 'Amuse yourself--for money.

Elso Sterrenberg Barghoorn Jr

There has been a revolution in our understanding over the last forty years, and the gains in knowledge are permanent. But we will never know everything, and that is as it should be. From the obscuring mist of the past, science has ensured that some of the mountains have emerged into clear view, but as soon as that happens the misty shadows of further peaks are glimpsed in the distance, rank upon rank: so many other heights to climb, so many mysteries to investigate.

Nevada...a land that is geology by day and astronomy at night

Repeatedly I have been impressed to learn that to reach a goal never before attained, one must do things never before done.

discovery starts with anomalies.

Just about a month from now I'm set adrift, with a diploma for a sail and lots of nerve for oars.

Let those who wish have their respectability- I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the earth for the beautiful, the joyous, and the romantic.

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark "Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think," surprise you? Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts.