Quotes About Exploration

Thanks to the growing strength of environmental organizations, there will always be some back country to provide us with a touch of wonder and a breath of fresh air.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.

It should not be denied... that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West.

After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom.

Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry: the heartbeat of the West as it fought its way upward toward civilization.

Anyone pretending to be a guide through wild and fabulous territory should know the territory. I wish I knew it better than I do. I am not Jed Smith. But Jed smith is not available these days as a guide, and I am. I accept the duty, at least as much for what I may learn as for what I may be able to tell others.

Es lässt sich wohl kaum abstreiten… dass die Vorstellung von einem freien, ungebundenen Leben uns seit jeher berauscht und beflügelt hat. In unserer Gedankenwelt verbinden wir damit die Flucht vor der Last der Geschichte, vor Unterdrückung, dem Gesetz und lästigen Verpflichtungen. Wir sehen uns nach der absoluten Freiheit, und der Weg dorthin führte schon immer gen Westen.

Westerners live outdoors more than people elsewhere because outdoors is mainly what they've got.

maybe we were the diggers of literature

An acquaintance with books and learning was not a thing that a frontier boy like John Wesley Powell could take for granted; he had to seize it as he could. Abe Lincoln said it for every such boy with brains and dreams in his head: "The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is a man who'll git me a book I ain't read.

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.

There is something ominous about a swift river, and something thrilling about a river of any kind. The nearest upstream bend is a gate out of mystery, the nearest downstream bend a door to further mystery.

girl of eighteen named Elsa Norgaard,

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

All poetry is experimental poetry.

It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.

Man is an eternal sophomore.

The dry eucalyptus seeks god in the rainy cloud. Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven seeks him In New Haven.

From the opening lines of the play Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise All you need, To find poetry, Is to look for it with a lantern.

The way through the world Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.

I never make a trip to the United States without visiting a supermarket. To me they are more fascinating than any fashion salon.