You know that sense of awe and excitement you feel when you’re setting out to do something new? When you’re embarking on an adventure, either physically or mentally? It’s that feeling of exhilaration that drives us to explore the world around us. To learn new things and experience new things. To push ourselves outside our comfort zones and see what we’re capable of.
So if you’re feeling restless and looking for a way to stretch your boundaries, check out these quotes about exploration. They’ll inspire you to seize life with both hands and go after what scares you the most.
Quotes About Exploration
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
Mark Twain
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
T. S. Eliot
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”Robert Frost
“Success is an act of exploration. That means the first thing you have to find is the unknown. Learning is searching; anything else is just waiting.”
Dale Dauten
“Exploration is wired into our brains. If we can see the horizon, we want to know what’s beyond.”
Buzz Aldrin
“The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.”
John Steinbeck
“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
“Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit.”
Frank Borman
“That is the exploration that awaits you! Not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.”
Leonard Nimoy
“Play stimulates the parts of the brain involved in both careful, logical reasoning and carefree, unbound exploration.”
Greg McKeown
“In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.”
Ansel Adams
“A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”
Lao Tzu
“Exploration is curiosity put into action.”
Don Walsh
“The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one’s own potentialities.”
Colin Wilson
“Not all who wander are lost.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
“Every exploration is an appropriation.”
Roland Barthes
“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.”
Saint Augustine
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”Henry David Thoreau
“Life is an empowered exploration towards consciousness development.”
Simion Hurghis
“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
T.S. Eliot
“Exploration is a wonderful way to open our eyes to the world, and to truly see that impossible is just a word.”
Richard Branson
“The future is in the hands of those who explore and from all the beauty they discover while crossing perpetually receding frontiers, they develop for nature and for humankind an infinite love.”
Jacques Yves Cousteau
“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”
Helen Keller
“The danger of adventure is worth a thousand days of ease and comfort.”
Paulo Coelho
“The camera basically is a license to explore.”
Jerry N. Uelsmann
“[F]ailure is a manifestation of learning and exploration.”
Ed Catmull
“The scientist and the artist are both passionate about their exploration.”
Arthur Ganson
“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing.”
E.L. Doctorow
“We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.”
John Hope Franklin
“Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate.”
Seneca
“All art is a kind of exploring. To discover and reveal is the way every artist sets about his business.”
Robert Flaherty
“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”
John Augustus Shedd
“Live your life by a compass, not a clock.”
Stephen Covey
“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
“Exploration really is the essence of the human spirit, and to pause, to falter, to turn our back on the quest for knowledge, is to perish.”
Frank Borman
“Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting.”
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
A Final Word
While it’s important to stay grounded in what we know and continue learning, it’s also essential to explore new horizons, uncover new mindsets, and gain fresh perspectives. We hope these quotes have inspired you to get out there and explore the world around you.
Which is your favorite from the list? Have any other quotes about exploration you’d add? Drop a comment below!
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