Quotes About Exploration

As we were coming up again, we met with some Indians of strange aspects, that is, of a larger size, and other sort of features, than those of our country. Our Indian slaves, that rowed us, asked them some questions, but they could not understand us, but showed us a long cotton string, with several knots on it, and told us, they had been coming from the mountains so many moons as there were knots.

Where there is no novelty, there can be no curiosity.

When I went South I never meant to write a book: I rather despised those who did so as being of an inferior brand to those who did things and said nothing about them. But that they say nothing is too often due to the fact that they have nothing to say, or are too idle or too busy to learn how to say it. Every one who has been through such an extraordinary experience has much to say, and ought to say it if he has any faculty that way.

Unfortunately the dogs misunderstood their orders and, instead of piloting us, dashed off on their own. We saw them like specks in the distance in the direction of the old seal crack.

Whilst we knew what we had suffered and risked better than any one else, we also knew that science takes no account of such things; that a man is no better for having made the worst journey in the world; and that whether he returns alive or drops by the way will be all the same a hundred years hence if his records and specimens come safely to hand.

If you think your own life hard, and would like to leave it for a short hour I recommend you to beg, borrow or steal this tale, and read and see how the penguins live. It is all quite true.

Then some prayers from the Burial Service: and there with the floor-cloth under them and the tent above we buried them in their sleeping-bags—and surely their work has not been in vain.

We traveled for science: those three small embryos from Cape Crozier, that weight of fossils from Barkley Island, and that mass of material less spectacular but gathered just as carefully hour by hour, in wind and drift, darkness and cold, was striven for in order that the world may have a little more knowledge, that it may build on what it knows instead of on what it thinks.

Five men went forward, Scott, Wilson, Bowers, Oates and Seaman Evans. They reached the Pole on January 17 to find that Amundsen had reached it thirty-four days earlier. They returned 721 statute miles and perished 177 miles from their winter quarters.

And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore.

Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.

If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.

I am glad The Worst Journey is coming out in Penguins: after all it is largely about penguins.

Those Hut Point days, would prove some of the happiest of my life. Just enough to eat and keep warm, no more - no frills or trimmings: there is many a worse and more elaborate life...the luxuries of civilisation satisfy only those wants which they themselves create.

Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion

From the masthead one can see a few patches of open water in different directions, but the main outlook is the same scene of desolate hummocky pack.

If you want a good polar traveller get a man without too much muscle, with good physical tone, and let his mind be on wires—of steel. And if you can't get both, sacrifice physique and bank on will.

For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organization, give me Scott; for a Winter Journey, Wilson; for a dash to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen: and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time.

We were the first that found that famous country:We marched by a king's name: we crossed the sierras:Unknown hardships we suffered: hunger.

The hours must be endured and those who cannot do so in life will most surely do so in death. You say you cannot face them? Life's joys and pains both? You shall find them waiting for you, a world of ignored moments there to be explored. Then shall you know how long an hour can be, shall feel the awful depth and restlessness of even a single day, and all the days you fled from life while you were alive.

Of course, not all journeys are undertaken for sacred purposes. Some people may undertake journeys for the simplest reason of all: curiosity. They wish to see what there is to see just beyond the next hill, or over the far river, or at the end of the long trail leading towards dawn....

Such stories ask us to remember that there are little things in the world around us that we hardly notice but which contain great beauty and strength; that we might learn by taking a closer at places we already thought we knew; that we overlook important knowledge by not asking enough questions of the land around us; that some places in the wilderness are not for us to visit; that there are always small, secret wonders hiding in nature, just out of view.

Fearlessness is the mother of reinvention.

In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Dumbledore asks Snape not to wake Harry: "Let him sleep. For in dreams, we enter a world that is entirely our own. Let him swim in the deepest ocean or glide over the highest cloud.