Quotes About Exploration

Almost everyone who opens up a new field does not really understand it the way the followers do." The evidence for this is, unfortunately, all too good. It has been said in physics no creator of any significant thing ever understood what he had done.

The thing about going abroad is that it's quite far away.

A university's essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism-a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.

Physical vision - one might say scientific vision - brings about a metaphysical shift in the observer's view of reality as a whole. The geography of the earth, or the structure of the solar system, are in an instant utterly changed, and forever. The explorer, the scientific observer, the literary reader, experience the Sublime: a moment of revelation into the idea of the unbounded, the infinite.

Alan Moorehead in The Fatal Impact (1966).

Cowper invented the idea of the 'armchair traveller': 'My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions, that I seem to partake with the navigators, in all the dangers they encountered. I lose my anchor; my main-sail is rent into shreds; I kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from my fireside.'90

Highlands of Scotland:

The cool feats of our scientific men are known to us all – such as that of Sir Humphry Davy inhaling a particular gas with an accurate report every minute or two of its successive effects upon his brain and sense.

Gonna get me one of them Jeep Cherokees with the four-wheel drive, and go all over the whole country in it.

Man is a coward in space, for he is by himself.

It has always seemed to me that there is something big to be felt by a man who has made up his mind to leave the things he knows and go off to strange places.

It has always seemed to me that there is something big to be felt by a man who has made up his mind to leave the things he knows and go off to strange places. I felt the same for the rose cuttings I took from the garden down to the cemetery. But men are different from flowers for they are able to make up their own minds about things. And that should make the feeling bigger, I think.

But the truth is I found out about Davy in the usual way a small boy finds out things he is denied to know by older people, and that is through other small boys.

An environment-based education movement--at all levels of education--will help students realize that school isn't supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.

Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.

One of my students told me that every time she learns the name of a plant, she feels as if she is meeting someone new. Giving a name to something is a way of knowing it.

Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination.

The physical exercise and emotional stretching that children enjoy in unorganized play is more varied and less time-bound than is found in organized sports. Playtime—especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play—is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development.

In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.

Nature is often overlooked as a healing balm for the emotional hardships in a child's life.

If you only knew the beauty which awaits you, Daniel. If you only knew how lovely are the realms which lie beyond this house. Would you keep yourself locked in a barren cell when all the beauties of the universe await you on the outside?

That's my job; to bring adventure into your life.

He'd been a great one for looking for greener pastures. He'd kept looking until all his pastures were brown with time.

as Huxley put it-'to sit down before fact as a little child—be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatsoever abysses nature leads.