Exploration Quotes

Is this not the very thing that drives an adventurous man to navigate uncharted oceans, to traverse continents and mountains, to pilot virgin estuaries and hidden coves—this promise of inscribing a name steadfast upon what he finds? There are few parcels of earth left to be claimed; yet even as the known world shrinks, the heavens grow ever more infinite. An explorer of the skies need never leave his home or fret over the swiftness of other expeditions; he might give whatever name he chooses to any new thing that wanders into his view.

~ John Pipkin

But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature: Adler, reducing almost everything to the will to power: and Jung, certainly the most humane and gentlest of them, and possibly the greatest, but nevertheless the descendant of parsons and professors, and himself a super-parson and a super-professor. all men of extraordinary character, and they devised systems that are forever stamped with that character.… Davey, did you ever think that these three men who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically. And it should never be forgotten that they made the inward journey while they were working like galley-slaves at their daily tasks, considering other people's troubles, raising families, living full lives. They were heroes, in a sense that no space-explorer can be a hero, because they went into the unknown absolutely alone. Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids? Why don't you go home and shoulder your yoke, and be a hero too?

~ Robertson Davies

We are all a little schizophrenic. Each of us has three different people living inside us every day—who you were, who you are and who you will become. The road to sanity is to recognize those identities, in order to know who you are today.

~ Shannon L. Alder

I now know, by an almost fatalistic conformity with the facts, that my destiny is to travel...

~ Ernesto Che Guevara

The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.

~ Freeman Dyson

I believe in always being open to learning more through exploration of everything available and following one's sense of curiosity, creativity, and playfulness.

~ Jay Woodman

And so we must dig in to see where raw words and fundamental sounds are buried so that the great silence within can finally be decoded.

~ Raymond Federman

Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job.

~ Victor Hugo

You take a step, then another. That’s the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it’s a remaking of your own mind.

~ Orson Scott Card

I feel part of the environment, not separate from it, as though I’m at home rather than visiting—as though I’m tapped into some eternal omnipresence beyond the transient physical forms.

~ Michael Sanders

I sit up and stare with eyes closed, perceiving the infinity of this dimension, so grateful to experience this, comfortable with the idea of this journey either ending shortly or continuing forever.

~ Michael Sanders

Dan explains the trip’s itinerary, which includes trekking through the jungle, boating down the Amazon River, and to my surprise, three Ayahuasca ceremonies.

~ Michael Sanders

To reach only for that which pleasantly enchants you is the least of imagination, if even imagination at all, by the obvious reality of remaining within your means. The greater of imagination is parallel to risk. It extends beyond your comfort zone or haven, or sense of beauty, or what you personally believe suits you in exploration of what may not.

~ Criss Jami

Real sex is as much about reciprocity as it is exploration and if you need a reason to resent a man later on, just consider the guy who doesn’t believe in cunnilingus...

~ Roberto Hogue

The depth of a man is a limit only he can know, should he have the courage to explore into the dark.

~ Kyle Schmalenberg

Just finished [Capitalist in North Korea]—fascinating! What an experience. Wow. —Justin Rohrlich, Emmy Award Winner, Head Writer, Minyanville's World In Review

~ Felix Abt

Stand up, Grow up and Climb up. The reason why you can’t see farther and further is because you didn’t climb higher. Be willing to explore and be informed!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

I know little of magic, Lady,' he said haltingly. 'I am but a woodcutter's son, and there is much that is not given to men to understand; but of this I am sure: there is more to things than we imagine. Beyond the stars are worlds without number, perhaps, and had I never sought to look beyond my own I should be the poorer for it.

~ Sylvia Engdahl

I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side.

~ Roman Payne

Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else - above all, a travel bureau - arrange everything before-hand?

~ Richard Aldington

Set out from any point. They are all alike. They all lead to a point of departure.

~ Antonio Porchia

All night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of his own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly--not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things the outer limits would suffice.

~ Ernesto Che Guevara

The map? I will first make it.

~ Patrick White

Every night we stopped in a cabin where wood had been stacked, matches left, and canned goods laid out for the chance traveler. All the unknown host received in return was a scribbled note giving our thanks, any news we could think of, and our names. This whole system of northern hospitality was a gigantic chain, for while we were eating this man’s beans, he was undoubtedly farther up the trail, eating somebody else’s.

~ Benedict Freedman

I was forced to wander, having no one, forced by my nature to keep wandering because wandering was the only thing that I believed in, and the only thing that believed in me.

~ Roman Payne

From all that I saw,and everywhere I wandered,I learned that time cannot be spent,It only can be squandered.

~ Roman Payne

Part of the urge to explore is a desire to become lost.

~ Tracy Johnston

While National Geographic magazine had given me a taste of the world, the three-dimensional details of this moment - the tickle of the rain drops, the suck sound of my feet in the mud, the challenge of getting photographs of the monkeys, my immature urge to make the driver wait even longer because he was annoying - would feed me for years to come.

~ Kristine K. Stevens

There were only three names on the map of the region we had brought with us, but we now filled in more than two hundred.

~ Heinrich Harrer

There is a saying, if any stranger enquire of the first met of Maan, were it even a child, “Who is here the sheykh?” he would answer him “I am he.

~ Charles M. Doughty

The perfect journey is never finished, the goal is always just across the next river, round the shoulder of the next mountain. There is always one more track to follow, one more mirage to explore.

~ Rosita Forbes

In real life, the big things and the little things are inextricably mixed up together, so in Libya at one moment, one worried because one's native boots were full of holes, and at the next, perhaps, one wondered how long one would be alive to wear them.

~ Rosita Forbes

Forbes did, in fact, break new ground for women...She was an irrepressible and independent traveler who took risky and difficult trips, braved the hostility of the colonial officials and bureaucrats of the British empire, and invaded the male sphere of exploration, using charm, chutzpah--and her extensive network of establishment connections--to get where she wanted to go. (From the Sahara to Samarkand: Selected Travel Writings of Rosita Forbes, 1919-1937)

~ Margaret Bald

The red sands of Marrakesh, sprawling at the foot of the Atlas like a wounded Leviathan....

~ Rosita Forbes

We rode through a three-thousand-year-old country, saw the ruined capital of the Queen of Sheba and the underground red-rock city of Lalibela, fraternized with a tribe of leaden-skinned troglogytes living among the mountains, scrapped with brigands, outwitted crocodiles, and eventually emerged battered and in rags with a book of adventures and 1,000 feet of film.

~ Rosita Forbes

The curly red lines across the African deserts had the fascination of a magnet, and I hoped fervently that the pioneers who were writing their names over the blank spaces, would leave just one small desert for me.

~ Rosita Forbes

Don't allow others to make you feel small. You came to this world to grow and to explore and touch the miracles and marvels of life.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Keep your ideals with you and seek help from them. These are useless for me. Your shoe do not fit mine. I am done with the exhibitionist of yours. You are professing of something that is even worthless for you. You are so insecure and coward to accept the truth. Dnt make me as miserable as you are. Let me explore myself. Let me unlearn the lie this world has given to me . Let me just undo al the data which is being engraved on my mind. Let me be a child who is just born.

~ Adeel Bin Ahmed

Writing is all at once an exploration of what is, and what is not. Of the known, and the unknown. A journey into the depths of self, and all of humankind.

~ Madelaine Standing

Like a Columbus of the heart, mind and soul I have hurled myself off the shores of my own fears and limiting beliefs to venture far out into the uncharted territories of my inner truth, in search of what it means to be genuine and at peace with who I really am. I have abandoned the masquerade of living up to the expectations of others and explored the new horizons of what it means to be truly and completely me, in all my amazing imperfection and most splendid insecurity.

~ Anthon St. Maarten