Quotes About Exploration

The starting point is a question.

Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.

No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly.

To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.

The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.

Uma biblioteca não é só um lugar de ordem e caos; também é o reino do acaso. mesmo depois de lhes atribuirmos uma prateleira e um número, os livros retêm uma mobilidade própria. Entregues a si mesmos, formam grupos inesperados; seguem regras secretas de semelhança, genealogias que nenhuma crónica regista, interesses e temas comuns.

Libraries, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic." - The Library at Night

Libraries are not, never will be, used by everyone.

We read to understand, or to begin to understand

The books on my shelves do not know me until I open them, yet I am certain that they address me — me and every other reader — by name; they await our comments and opinions. I am presumed in Plato as I am presumed in every book, even in those I'll never read.

A library is not only a place of both order and chaos; it is also the realm of chance. Books, even after they have been given a shelf and a number, retain a mobility of their own.

Each technology has its own merits, and therefore it may be more useful to leave aside this crusading view of the electronic word vanquishing the printed one and explore instead each technology according to its particular merits. Perhaps

Imensamente generosos, os meus livros, não me fazem nenhuma exigência, antes me oferecem todo tipo de iluminação.

the satisfaction of one answer merely leads to asking another question, and so on into infinity.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.

O brave new world that has such people in it.

For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.

You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.

Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east...

science has explained nothing; ...the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness....

Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul.

You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.