Quotes About Exploration

if it scares you, it might be a good thing to try

we're seeing an explosion in new approaches, new models and new forms of interaction. This growth comes from change, insight and exploration, not obedience.

College started as universitas magistrorum et scholarium—a community of masters and scholars. It was a refuge; it was a place you went to get lost in ideas, to discover and wander, and to plot a course as an academic. Today it's a place you go to exchange a lifetime of debt for credit hours, a degree, and maybe a good job.

One way to become creative is to discipline yourself to generate bad ideas. The worse the better. Do it a lot and magically you'll discover that good ones slip through

Like the fox, we've been trained to stay inside the fence, because inside the fence is where it's safe—until it's too late.

A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to his religion before he explores it.

Art isn't a result; it's a journey. The challenge of our time is to find a journey worthy of your heart and your soul.

if we canceled the shuttle, we'd create an urgent need for a replacement. The lack of a way to get to space would force us to invent a new, better, cheaper alternative.

For the important work, the instructions are always insufficient. For the work we'd like to do, the reward comes from the fact that there is no guarantee, that the path isn't well lit, that we cannot possibly be sure it's going to work.

The only people we can serve are curious, dissatisfied, or bored.

Here's the truth that you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map.

The path forward is about curiosity, generosity, and connection. These are the three foundations of art.

To be willing to do new things you don't think you'll like requires you to prefer the unknown. Not just to tolerate it, but to prefer it.

A curious person embraces the tension between his religion and something new, wrestles with it and through it, and then decides whether to embrace the new idea or reject it.

Curious people count. Not because there are a lot of them, but because they're the ones who talk to people who are in a stupor. They're the ones who lead the masses in the middle who are stuck. The masses in the middle have brainwashed themselves into thinking it's safe to do nothing, which the curious can't abide.

the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map.

Lab assistants do what they're told. Scientists figure out what to do next.

Scientist thinks there is a biology beyond earth not because we found it, it's simply because if not then earth is some sort of miracle.

The shelf number for the book would be inked in beside it, but each shelf contained about fifty books, so you had to hang there on the ladder and read every spine of every one until you came across yours. Let it be said that nothing was ever accomplished in haste at Iverson.

To her, the journey was as important as the destination.

That's what mountains do, they taunt you, lure you to the freedom of the wilderness, and it is fucking exhilarating.

The idea to go West just fell into my lap from the sky. Go west, young man. That's how the best ideas happen. Just out of nowhere. When you're not even thinking. Like they've been created for you and you just have to reach out and grab them before someone else does.

I love the way that each book -- any book -- is its own journey. You open it, and off you go. You are changed in some way, large or small, by having traveled with those characters.

What exactly did people do when they had all the time in the world and could do whatever they liked? (p 153)