Quotes About Exploration

There comes a time in a man's life when he has to pull up stakes. Has to light out. Has to stop straddling, and start cutting, fence.

It is no longer easy, on the South Rim, to get away from the roar of motor traffic, except by descending into the canyon.

Better to idle through one park in two weeks than try to race through a dozen in the same amount of time. Those who are familiar with both modes of travel know from experience that this is true; the rest have only to make the experiment to discover the same truth for themselves.

And most significant, these hordes of nonmotorized tourists, hungry for a taste of the difficult, the original, the real, do not consist solely of people young and athletic but also of old folks, fat folks, pale-faced office clerks who don't know a rucksack from a haversack, and even children. The one thing they all have in common is the refusal to live always like sardines in a can—they are determined to get outside of their motorcars for at least a few weeks each year.

La planète est plus grande que nous ne l'avons jamais imaginée. Le monde est plus froid, plus ancien, plus étrange et plus mystérieux que nous ne l'avons jamais rêvé. Et nous, misérables créatures humaines avec nos innombrables outils et jouets et peurs et espoirs ne sommes qu'une petite feuille sur le grand arbre efflorescent de la vie.

Edward Abbey

take a long quiet walk straight into the canyons, get lost for a while, come back when you damn well feel like it

Actually our ignorance and carelessness are more deliberate than accidental; we are entering Glen Canyon without having learned much about it beforehand because we wish to see it as Powell and his party had seen it, not knowing what to expect, making anew the discoveries of others. If the first rapids are a surprise to us it is simply because we had never inquired if there were any on this stretch of the river.

you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.

A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.

You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

Wilderness. The word itself is music.

You gotta have a swine to show you where the truffles are.

Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.

Read the great stuff but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.

If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

I write to find out what I'm talking about.

It's one of those things a person has to do; sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.

Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.

I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent. Curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas. —Albert Einstein

Effective students and creative innovators regularly strive to uncover the unintended consequences of a lesson learned or a new idea.