Quotes About Exploration

One day [the prince] lost sight of his retinue in a great forest. These forests are very useful in delivering princes from their courtiers, like a sieve that keeps back the bran. Then the princes get away to follow their fortunes. In this they have the advantage of the princesses, who are forced to marry before they have had a bit of fun. I wish our princesses got lost in a forest sometimes.

a man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood…. Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed.

every question is a door-handle.

I forced my way to the brink, stepped into the boat, pushed it, with the help of the tree-branches, out into the stream, lay down in the bottom, and let my boat and me float whither the stream would carry us.

A shudder ran through her from head to foot when she found that the thread was actually taking her into the hole out of which the stream ran.

She did not hesitate. Right into the hole she went, which was high enough to let her walk without stooping. For a little way there was a brown glimmer, but at the first turn it all but ceased, and before she had gone many paces she was in total darkness.

It seems the way to find some things is to lose yourself.

A library can't be made all at once, any more than a house, or a nation, or a great tree: they must all take time to grow, and so must a library...Folk must make acquaintance among books as they would among living folk.

wordy descriptions of the journey, which you can get from Parkman or Gregg if you want them – or from volume

Steampunk is...a joyous fantasy of the past, allowing us to revel in a nostalgia for what never was. It is a literary playground for adventure, spectacle, drama, escapism and exploration. But most of all it is fun!

There were fewer finer things in life, in Newbury's humble opinion, than spending time perusing the shelves of a good bookshop.

And it's a wonderful thing to be a boy, to go roaming where grown-ups can't catch you, and to chase rats and kill birds and shy stones and cheek carters and shout dirty words. It's a kind of a strong, rank feeling, a feeling of knowing everything and fearing nothing, and it's all bound up with breaking rules and killing things.

And it was a queer thing I'd done coming here.

Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought.

a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.

Jack Parsons was just such a figure, living on the cusp between an old world in which the very idea of space travel was a scientific absurdity and a new world in which it would become scientific fact.

As for study, did not our wise teacher teach us that learning was of two kinds: the one kind being the things we learned and knew, and the other being the training that taught us how to find out what we did not know?

L'art de voyager, c'est presque la science de la vie.

The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.

Having come so close to losing everything, I am freed now of all fear, hesitation, and timidity, and, once revived, intend to devoutly wander the earth, imbibing, smelling, sampling, loving whomever I please; touching, tasting, standing very still among the beautiful things of this world

It was like the baby was demanding, with its eyes: Hurry up, tell me what all this shit is, so I can master it, open a few shops.

And we rode forward into the night, past the sleeping houses of our countrymen.

since he'd never even heard that described as being possible. And from that day on, whenever he found himself wondering

In those girls I found my Rome, my Paris, my Constantinople.