Quotes About Exploration

The road to India, the Suez Canal, the oil fields of Mosul, the whole complex of political and strategic requirements that drew Britain into Palestine in 1918, began with the enterprise of the Elizabethan merchant adventurers.

If the historian will submit himself to his material instead of trying to impose himself on his material, then the material will ultimately speak to him and supply the answers.

As a writer, I will go down any dark alley, inch my way through the tightest crawl space, and feed on your every fear. I will take your sense of calm and tear it to shreds. - Horror Author Barbara Watkins

We walk the paths we choose.

When you're spontaneous, there's always the opportunity that you'll surprise yourself and discover something new.

Then I sped across the prairies of ether and stood upon the moon. It was no longer luminous, its hardness hurt my feet; And I found that it had nothing either to sell or give me; Its empty frankness was brutal as a blow.

I met one man who refused to speak of the earth, and was always talking about "going on." I reminded him that if he went on far enough he would come back to the place from which he started.

So if you go from the hippie thing to more of a Gatsby community, so what? Life is short and you have an opportunity to explore as much of it as fortune and time allow.

If interstellar travel is as time- or energy- demanding as the above figures indicate, it is far from obvious what the motive for colonization might be.

It would be a pity if, frustrated by the price of travel, we elected to become a society that never made contact, that never gave SETI a fair chance.

Of course we want to perform the poses with a focus on intelligent mechanics of body movement ... and push ourselves to the point of discomfort in order to create new results. But, at the same time, we want to be detached from insatiably perfecting that form and instead seek and create a depth of experience.

We travel because, no matter how comfortable we are at home, there's a part of us that wants--that needs--to see new vistas, take new tours, obtain new traveler's checks, buy new souvenirs, order new entrees, introduce new bacteria into our intestinal tracts, learn new words for "transfusion," and have all the other travel adventures that make us want to french-kiss our doormats when we finally get home.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying looking at the surface of the ocean itself, except that when you finally see what goes on underwater, you realize that you've been missing the whole point of the ocean. Staying on the surface all the time is like going to the circus and staring at the outside of the tent.

savoring the sense of loneliness and freedom that comes only from solitary sojourns in strange lands...

But it's like swimming underwater, you know? At first you feel as though you could go along forever, seeing everything from this new perspective, but eventually you have to come up for air.

To inquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then, is to provoke thoughts about one's own interior landscape, and the familiar landscapes of memory. The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.

I don't believe in writer's block. Writer's block is when you're running down an ally and all of a sudden you're trapped by a brick wall. You can't go under, over, or through it. You're stuck. But the problem isn't that you can't pass the brick wall. You see, the problem is that you went down the wrong ally.

Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars;Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars.In other words, hold my hand!In other words, darling, kiss me!

Another possibility is to use the Captain

You don't reach Serendib by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings ... serendipitously.

Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.

The only thing you discover in the unknown is more of yourself.

It is like the expanding universe. The more our instruments penetrate it, the further the limits recede. We therefore have to assume that this expansion, this retreat, is directly proportional to the power of our instruments.

Now we can cross the Shifting Sands.