Quotes About Exploration

Or supposing humans had developed different abilities than those they have now and had learned magic rather than, say, calculus . .

Every exploration is an appropriation.

Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions

Disappointment of various places and trips. Not really comfortable anywhere. Very soon, this cry: I want to go back! (but where? since she is no longer anywhere, who was once where I could go back). I am seeking my place. Sitio.

The Tower is not a usual spectacle; to enter the Tower, to scale it, to run around its courses, is, in a manner both more elementary and more profound, to accede to a view and to explore the interior of an object (though an openwork one), to transform the touristic rite into and adventure of sight and of the intelligence.

Men, as Amundsen liked to say, are the unknown factor in the Antarctic.

Nansen had moreover introduced a startling new concept into Polar exploration. He had deliberately cut off his lines of retreat. His route was from the desolate east coast to the inhabited west. This was not bravado, but calculated exploitation of the instinct of self-preservation. It drove him on; there was no incentive to look back.

It was the inward, not the outer world that engrossed Shackleton. He did not share the semi-pagan nature worship in which Nansen and Nordenskjöld were steeped.

Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility. From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises.

Vagabonding is an attitude—a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word. Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It's just an uncommon way of looking at life—a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And, as much as anything, vagabonding is about time—our only real commodity—and how we choose to use it.

Travel, I was coming to realize, was a metaphor not only for the countless options life offers but also for the fact that choosing one option reduces you to the parameters of that choice. Thus, in knowing my possibilities, I also knew my limitations.

you should view each new travel frustration—sickness, fear, loneliness, boredom, conflict—as just another curious facet in the vagabonding adventure.

We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope;

finding a singular travel experience doesn't require heroism so much as a simple change of mind-set. The reason so many travelers become frustrated while visiting world-famous destinations is that they are still playing by the rules of home, which "reward" you for following set routines and protocols.

After all, vagabonding involves sacrifices, and its particular sacrifices are not for everyone.

Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age to increase your personal options instead of your personal possessions.

antisabbatical"—a job approached "with the sole intention of staying for a limited period of time (often one year)…to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity.

answers. I took another swig of water, screwed the cap back on and thought about the next place I must look for Doc. I did not like it

When you step out onto the ineffable fabric of your own invention, it is key, essential to act just like that character in the cartoons who steps off the cliff onto the absolute air. Do not look down. You wrote it; you can stand on it to reach for the next thing.

Searching for oil was wildly unpredictable, whereas refining seemed safe and methodical by comparison.

As he ventured timidly beyond the self-contained world of his youth, he could not just enjoy spontaneous pleasure and had to justify it in terms of self-improvement.

that favored stability over innovation, predictability over experimentation

This wasn't someone I had encountered in any biography.

The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place? —LOUISE BOGAN, Journey Around My Room