#exploration

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

#home #new-beginnings #dreams

Before he goes into the water, a diver cannot know what he will bring back. ↗

— Max Ernst

#exploration #subconscious #art

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity – I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only a euphemism for folly. ↗

— Plato

#character #self-exploration #beauty

At this period, too, Leningraders resorted to their most desperate food substitutes, scraping dried glue from the underside of wallpaper and boiling up shoes and belts. (Tannery processes had changed, they discovered, since the days of Amundsen and Nansen, and the leather remained tough and inedible.) ↗

— Anna Reid

#polar-exploration #siege #starvation #wwii #change

We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.... We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. (1970 English translation) ↗

— Stanisław Lem

#imperialism #jingoism #new-worlds #racism #science-fiction

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

#exploration #horror #inspirational #death

We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#exploration #role-models #science #scientists #space

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

#exploration #tanzania #travel #dreams

We hold the future still timidly, but perceive it for the first time as a function of our own action. ↗

— J.D. Bernal

#religion #space-exploration #religion

When I think of the causes for which people more commonly give up their lives-nationalism, religion, ethnicity-it seems to me that a thirty-five pound bag of rocks and the lost world it represents, is not such a bad thing to die for. ↗

— Anne Fadiman

#polar-exploration #religion