Exploration Quotes

Heresy would like to think of itself as 'invented Truth'. But of course, all Reason and Logic would agree that no man can ever create Truth; he can only discover it. If heresy were ever at all beneficial, God would use it really to bring one right back to Truth, as countless 'inventions' have brought men to discovery.

~ Criss Jami

Being the Novelist-in-Residence at a riad hotel in the kasbah of an Arabic North African city is a lot like trying to write one’s memoirs on shreds of napkins in a nuthouse.

~ Roman Payne

Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra... these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known...

~ Vladimir Nabokov

Through a strange kind of geographic arrogance, Europeans like to think that the world was a silent, dark, unknown place until they trooped out and discovered it.

~ Tahir Shah

Exploration is a dirty game.

~ Tahir Shah

It often horrified the English community that she spent her time with local farmers and horse traders, eccentrics and mystics, but she valued expertise over convention and had long believed if you were going to make discoveries in the world you must first quit your Englishness and open your eyes.

~ Sara Sheridan

To lovers of adventure and novelty, Africa displays a most ample field.

~ James Rennell

Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name.

~ Samuel Butler

What is adventure? Adventure offers every human being the ability to live ‘the’ moment of his or her most passionate idea, fantasy or pursuit. It may take form in the arts, acting, sports, travel or other creative endeavors. Once engaged, a person enjoys ‘satori’ or the perfect moment. That instant may last seconds or a lifetime. The key to adventure whether it be painting, dancing, sports or travel: throw yourself into it with rambunctious enthusiasm and zealous energy—which leads toward uncommon passion for living. By following that path, you will attract an amazing life that will imbue your spirit and fulfill your destiny as defined by you alone. In the end, you will savor the sweet taste of life pursuing goals that make you happy, rewarded and complete. As a bonus, you may share your life experiences with other bold and uncommon human beings that laugh at life, compare themselves with no one and enjoy a whale of a ride! Frosty Wooldridge from How to Live a Life of Adventure: The Art of Exploring the World

~ Frosty Wooldridge

Refusing the false securities of a stable and linear past, such an approach celebrates heterogeneous sensations and surprising associations, random connections, the ongoing construction of meaning and also admits into its orbit the mysterious agency of artifacts, space and non-humans from the past.

~ Tim Edensor

Life wants you to be complete unto yourself, generally enjoy and expand consciousness, open, explore, love.

~ Jay Woodman

They might be drugs that alter the states of consciousness, or they might be states of transcendence reached in meditation. They might be moments of orgasm, or fugue states, or day-dreams that take you momentarily to a rewarding fantasy and escape from responsibility. All of these are treasures of the spirit or psyche that allow exploration along paths which are undefined and completely individual.

~ Alexander Shulgin

To conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Space, as you can see, is a complete void, nothing but clear air, without solid objects or the illumination of light. On some of our photographs of space, however, studied close to, even without a magnifying glass or an enlargement lens, you will notice, in the remote background, stars, some solitary, others in shimmering clusters. And in the next set of photographs you will see the alien machine we encountered that sat stubbornly stationary in the way of our unselfgoverned path.

~ Philip Dodd

Flammflorbs, archypodsplays, clinker crabs, dorsaldorydabbs, mingslakks, linglimes, occocobbers, firgengobblers, smitesnides, orkusta shelled bunkbarnacles, balootabinks, jorgentua jellyfish, tungol widders, teleosti chimaras, and things stranger, yet to be named, Klubbe and his crew members observed through their portholes, lit by the lamps of their submarine's lanterns.

~ Philip Dodd

Just because you feel lost doesn't mean that you're doing something wrong. Feeling certain that you are correct in every decision and situation is an addiction. If you think that the journey of self-discovery will bring you more solid facts and certainties about yourself and the world, you will be frustrated. The more you see, the more lost you will feel. That is natural. The more you discover of yourself, the more confused you will become. This is natural. The wiser you get, the more you will see that there are many paths walked by just as many people, and that just because yours is different from someone else's doesn't mean one of you is wrong. This is natural. Over time, you will develop humility, compassion, and a higher tolerance for confusion. If you allow the feeling of being lost to drive you into a search for absolute truths and correct answers, you may feel more secure when you get there, but in reality, you will be taking a step back. Allow yourself to be lost, and you will see so much more of the forest of your soul than if you beeline back for the trail. Explore. Get lost. Embrace the inevitability of confusion.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

Explore Art without a campus, it is fulfilling in the unknown.

~ Unarine Ramaru

They glided out of the heat-haze on their camels like specters. There were twenty of them, and they were Tuareg. Their faces were hidden by black veils that left only slits for the eyes, and they wore purple robes that fluttered in the desert wind. They carried swords, muskets and seven-foot iron spears, and wore stilettos in sheaths on their left forearms. They were an impressive, sinister sight.

~ Michael Asher

Now, what’s stirring in this murky sea of complexity and foolishness is an almost suffocating need to breathe fresh history.

~ Laurie Perez

Explore your inner creative genius through the medium you love and enjoy the journey!

~ Ken Poirot

No,' she says, as if the suggestion is ridiculous. 'I wouldn't go back to where I'm from. I'd go someplace I've never been.

~ Ally Condie

One of the powerful functions of a library — any library — lies in its ability to take us away from worlds that are familiar and comfortable and into ones which we can neither predict nor control, to lead us down new roads whose contours and vistas provide us with new perspectives. Sometimes, if we are fortunate, those other worlds turn out to have more points of familiarity with our own than we had thought. Sometimes we make connections back to familiar territory and when we have returned, we do so supplied with new perspectives, which enrich our lives as scholars and enhance our role as teachers. Sometimes the experience takes us beyond our immediate lives as scholars and teachers, and the library produces this result particularly when it functions as the storehouse of memory, a treasury whose texts connect us through time to all huma

~ Richard F. Thomas

All people intuitively seek emotional equanimity, freedom from anxiety, distress, and trepidation that might cause a person to lose symmetrical balance of their mind. Nature intended for human beings to live in an enthusiastic and curious manner, always exploring, striving, and creating.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was. Likewise, I never imagined that home might be something I would miss.

~ Ransom Riggs

We were like the Mount Everest climbers stepping over frozen corpses from prior climbing disasters in our quest for the summit. Like those climbers, we were motivated by a fear far greater than death—the fear of not reaching the top.

~ Mike Mullane

...so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn't become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.

~ Ransom Riggs

There is every reason to think that in the coming years Mars and its mysteries will become increasingly familiar to the inhabitants of the Planet Earth.

~ Carl Sagan

Whatever the reason we first mustered the _Apollo_ program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of _Apollo_. What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival.Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again.

~ Carl Sagan

Before we invented civilization our ancestors lived mainly in the open out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment we watched the stars. There were practical calendar reasons of course but there was more to it than that. Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away.

~ Carl Sagan

If you know who you are then your ego feels safe instead of fearful, and is more open to exploration.

~ Julia Woodman

Sometimes we have to behave indifferent towards people who proclaim their love to us, just to see if they are really different.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e. with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science. It then continues with a more or less extended exploration of the area of anomaly. And it closes only when the paradigm theory has been adjusted so that the anomalous has become the expected.

~ Thomas Kuhn

Why then seek to complete in a few decades what took the other nations of the world thousands of years? Why, in your hurry to subdue and utilize nature, squander her splendid gifts? You have opportunities such as mankind has never had before, and may never have again.

~ James Bryce

My ambition is not to leave behind me a pile of money for my heirs to quarrel about, but to find out what there is of interest in this world before I cross the border and begin to explore the other world.

~ George H. Hepworth

A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree, one is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander.

~ Roman Payne

Real scientists do not take vacations. They take field trips...

~ Edward O. Wilson

I'm nineteen tree rings and mashed acorns stop up my veins when I can't clot. Oh god, you beautiful person, I'll let you lick the salt off of my tattoos as if they were wounds, wounds made of ink and stories.

~ Taylor Rhodes

Death is the great disruptor; it thrusts us opposite life’s mirror, invites our truthful exploration, and reveals the naked truth; from which rebirth is possible and we are free to reinvent ourselves anew.

~ B.g. Bowers

Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.

~ Carl Sagan

Once upon a time, we soared into the Solar System. For a few years. Then we hurried back. Why? What happened? What was 'Apollo' really about?

~ Carl Sagan