Quotes About Exploration

Thrown into a vast open sea with no navigation charts and all the marker buoys sunk and barely visible, we have only two choices left: we may rejoice in the breath-taking vistas of new discoveries -- or we may tremble out of fear of drowning.

La cultura no puede convivir pacíficamente con la gestión, sobre todo, cuando ésta es molesta e insidiosa, y, más aún, cuando se trata de una gestión dedicada a distorsionar las ansias exploradoras/experimentadoras de la cultura para que encaje en el marco de la racionalidad dibujado por los gestores

El amor está muy cercano a la trascendencia; es tan sólo otro nombre del impulso creativo y, por lo tanto, está cargado de riesgos, ya que toda creación ignora siempre cuál será su producto final.

Anche se prendiamo strade diverse, se scopriamo possibilità differenti e torniamo dalla spedizione con esperienze diverse e quindi con soluzioni diverse, non dobbiamo ritenere che nessuna di esse sia inutile a priori, o escluderle in linea di principio solo per il fatto che sono diverse dalla nostra soluzione, inevitabilmente per noi preferibile.

One of the advantages of being disorganized is that one is always having surprising discoveries.

When you see someone putting on his Big Boots, you can be pretty sure that an Adventure is going to happen.

Bond Team could forget about secret-agenting in the field for a while. To begin with, they could hardly find their way around the school, let alone a supervillain's secret complex.

Luke, I don't want to discourage your curiosity, but I have to remind you, if something goes wrong, this is an exceptionally embarrassing way to die.

What can come?" my grandson Sam asked, when he was very young, after his mother had warned him not to go into the woods after dark. What can come? This was a brilliant question. Can is scarier than will. What will come limits itself. What can come has no boundaries.

Towering genius distains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

The larger the island of knowledge the longer the shore line of wonder. Wonder rather than doubt is the root of knowledge.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

With every step he took in Africa, Stanley planned how to tell the story once he got home. In a twentieth-century way, he was always sculpting the details of his own celebrity.

Henry Morton Stanley

As king of a small country with no public interest in colonies, he recognized that a colonial push of his own would require a strong humanitarian veneer. Curbing the slave trade, moral uplift, and the advancement of science were the aims he would talk about, not profits. In 1876, he began planning a step to establish his image as a philanthropist and advance his African ambitions: he would host a conference of explorers and geographers.

Ranulf Higden, a Benedictine monk who mapped the world about 1350, claimed that Africa contained one-eyed people who used their feet to cover their heads. A geographer in the next century announced that the continent held people with one leg, three faces, and the heads of lions. In 1459, an Italian monk, Fra Mauro, declared Africa the home of the roc, a bird so large that it could carry an elephant through the air.

To those who had lived in Africa for millennia, of course, "there was nothing to discover, we were here all the time," as a future African statesman would put it. But to nineteenth-century Europeans, celebrating an explorer for "discovering" some new corner of Africa was, psychologically, a prelude to feeling that the continent was theirs for the taking.

One traveler to the Congo came on a deserted town where a fifteen-foot boa constrictor was dining on smallpox victims' flesh, and on another where the vultures were so gorged that they were too heavy to fly.

do not understand Englishmen at all," Stanley wrote. "Either they suspect me of some self-interest, or they do not believe me. . . . For the relief of Livingstone I was called an impostor; for the crossing of Africa I was called a pirate." Nor was there enthusiasm in the United States for Congo colonization. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., in New York, now wanted to send Stanley off in search of the North Pole.

I began to read more. The further I explored, the more it was clear that the Congo of a century ago had indeed seen a death toll of Holocaust dimensions.

The Odyssey is constantly free and constantly inventive.

Odysseus is always slipping out, the man who has been everywhere, seen everything, done everything

Man seeks ecstasy and transcendence, and if he cannot find them in church, he will look for them elsewhere.

It's the feeling of being an eternal student that keeps this profession interesting.