Quotes About Navigation

We go straight". I say again. "If we start making turns, we might not know what direction is what. If we keep going straight, at least we know how to get back to where we came from if we get into trouble. I know it's tiring, but walking uphill is a good thing-every step we take is a step closer to getting out." "I see shoulders droop, I hear heavy sighs. They don't want to agree with me; they want to go the easier way".

The joke was thinking you were ever really in charge of your life. You pressed your oar down into the water to direct the canoe, but it was the current that shot you through the rapids. You just hung on and hoped not to hit a rock or a whirlpool.

Every bit of our lives revolves around how we get from one place to another and how long it's going to take to get there and what time of day you have to leave to do it.

The ancients considered the Pillars of Hercules the head of navigation and the end of the world. The information the ancients didn't have was very voluminous.

Naturally the question suggests itself, Why did these people want the river now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding generations? Apparently it was because at this late day they thought they had discovered a way to make it useful; for it had come to be believed that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California, and therefore afforded a short cut from Canada to China. Previously the supposition had been that it emptied into the Atlantic, or Sea of Virginia.

There's only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.' That was a dismal revelation to me; for my memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges.

I had better water than that, and ran it lower down; started out from the false point—mark twain—raised the second reef abreast the big snag in the bend, and had quarter less twain.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, unless, of course, you are congress.

What's the name of the first point above New Orleans?' I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know.

When I say I'll learn {footnote ['Teach' is not in the river vocabulary.]} a man the river, I mean it. And you can depend on it, I'll learn him or kill him.

Stars to live by. Stars to steer by. Stars to die by.

La triangulación es el método del cartógrafo. Si conoce la posición y la altura de dos lugares y ve un tercero, puede establecer su correspondiente posición y altura. Los mapas son eso: triángulos invisibles.

There are not many road signs in Russia, you know.' He laughed. 'If you don't know where the road goes, you shouldn't be on it.'" — Arkady Renko from Gorky Park

John – tell me, are we lost?

it gave me a little plastic book with four fold-outs, maps of the city's transit system. When I wanted to go somewhere, I touched the silver-printed name - street, level, square - and instantly on the map a circuit of all the necessary connections lit up. I could also travel by gleeder. Or by rast. Or - finally - on foot; therefore, four maps

A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats. In a ten-foot dinghy one can get an idea of the resources of the sea in the line of waves that is not probable to the average experience, which is never at sea in a dinghy.

the North Pole, but to someone looking from the equator, it appears to lie just at the horizon. From the difference in the apparent position of the North Star in Egypt and Greece, Aristotle even quoted an estimate that the distance

The Greeks even had a third argument that the earth must be round, for why else does one first see the sails of a ship coming over the horizon, and only later see the hull?

In fact, if general relativity were not taken into account in GPS satellite navigation systems, errors in global positions would accumulate at a rate of about ten kilometers each day!

If you find you are traveling on wrong road, turn to the right direction.

You don't command wind in the direction it blows, but you command a ship in the direction it sails.

When life's great storms come, the weak sink, the cowardly jump ship, the strong drop an anchor, the mighty adjust their sails, and the great sail on to their destiny.

A ship that sails without a compass will get lost at sea.

The human heart is like a ship on a stormy sea driven about by winds blowing from all four corners of heaven.