Quotes by Explorers - Page 2

Once upon a time the world was a realm of unanswered questions and there was room in it for poetry. Man stood beneath the sky and he asked “why?”. And his question was beautiful.The new world will be a place of answers and no questions, because the only questions left will be answered by computers, because only computers will know what to ask.Perhaps that is the way it has to be.
James Cameron
Life is better than death I believe if only because it is less boring and because it has fresh peaches in it.
Thomas Walker
In this century wars will not be fought over oil, as in the past, but over water. The situation is becoming desperate. The world's water is strained by population growth. There is no more fresh water on earth than two thousand years ago when the population was three percent of its current size. Even without the inevitable droughts, like the current one, it will get worse as demand and pollution increase. Some countries will simply run out of water, sparking a global refugee crisis. Tens of millions of people will flood across international borders. It means the collapse of fisheries, environmental destruction, conflict, lower living standards." She paused for a moment. "As people who deal with the ocean you must see the irony. We are facing a shortage on a planet whose surface is covered two-thirds with water.
Clive Cussler
Think positive, Butch.
Horace Dade Ashton
An Arabian proverb says there are four sorts of men: He who knows not and knows not he knows not: he is a fool-shun him. He who knows not and knows he knows not: he is simple-teach him. He who knows and knows not he knows: he is asleep-wake him. He who knows and knows he knows: he is wise-follow him.
Lady Isabel Burton
For me, exploration was a personal venture. I did not go to the Arabian desert to collect plants nor to make a map; such things were incidental. At heart I knew that to write or even to talk of my travels was to tarnish the achievement. I went there to find peace in the hardship of desert travel and the company of desert peoples. I set myself a goal on these journeys, and, although the goal itself was unimportant, its attainment had to be worth every effort and sacrifice... No, it is not the goal but the way there that matters, and the harder the way the more worth while the journey.
Wilfred Thesiger
The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two "hungers". There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning...There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning.There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you're happy or unhappy. You are content - you are not alone in your Spirit - you belong.
Laurens van der Post
Thinking can only serve to measure out the helplessness of thought.
H. Rider Haggard
Strange are the pictures of the future that mankind can thus draw with this brush of faith and these many-coloured pigments of the imagination! Strange, too, that no one of them tallies with another!
H. Rider Haggard
I demolish my bridges behind me ... then there is no choice but forward.
Firdtjof Nansen
That which is alive hath known death, and that which is dead can never die, for in the Circle of the Spirit life is naught and death is naught. Yea, all things live forever, though at times they sleep and are forgotten.
H. Rider Haggard
Constantly seeking approval means you’re perpetually worried that others are forming negative judgments of you. This steals the fun, ingenuity, and spontaneity from your life. Flip the switch on this habit. If you’re lucky enough to have something that makes you different from everybody else, don’t be ashamed and don’t change. Uniqueness is priceless. In this crazy world that’s trying to make you like everyone else, find the courage to keep being your remarkable self. It takes a lot of courage to stand alone, but being unapologetically YOU is worth it!
John Geiger
I will place no value on anything I have or may possess except in relation to the kingdom of Christ.
David Livingstone
I know you're the only pistol champion we have, but I'd rather they no see enough of you to hit. You're also the only wife I have...""You're so sweet.'"...at the moment.
Clive Cussler
i had a dream when i was 22 that someday i would go to the region of ice and snow and go on and on till i came to one of the poles of the earth
Ernest Shackleton
Who you affect is more powerful than who you are at any given moment. Nothing is as enduring as a great memory. In the end, its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, and feelings that last. Stone cracks. Wood rots. Skin dies. But great thoughts, beautiful experiences, and inspiring legends… they live forever. If you can change the way people think and feel, the way they see themselves, and the way they interpret the world, it means you can change the way they live their lives, and how they affect others. That is, by far, the longest lasting thing you can create.
John Geiger
Every day you choose your own reality with the thoughts in your head and the actions you take or don’t take. We are all born with the same opportunity to live a full and happy life. Don’t blame your circumstances. An effective mindset is one that makes the best use of available resources that are in front of you and within you. This includes your time, energy and efforts and uses them to create positive change. It’s not about trying to do everything and be everything, it’s making the very best of what you have while enjoying the process of living.
John Geiger
It is better to go skiing and think of God, than go to church and think of sport.
Fridtjof Nansen
The church says the earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the church.
Ferdinand Magellan
Truly a good horse, good ground to gallop on, and sunshine, make up the sum of enjoyable travelling.
Isabella L. Bird
I'd like to be born the son of a duke with 90,000 pounds a year, on an enormous estate.... And I'd like to have the most enormous library, and I'd like to think that I could read those books forever and forever, and die unlamented, unknown, unsung, unhonored - and packed with information.
Richard Francis Burton
Ah! how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathers it up like water, but like water it runs between his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, 'See, he is a wise man!' Is it not so?
H. Rider Haggard
Be the kind of person that others admire, can count on, trust and enjoy spending time with. After you have developed that reputation, people will start to ask you what you do, and will want to work with you on the things that matter. When you focus on leading a passionate, meaningful and faithful life, you are also inadvertently creating a spectacular ripple effect of inspiration in the lives around you. When one person is making a difference and being a positive role model, everyone nearby feels their passionate energy. Before too long, they too, are leading by example and simultaneously inspiring others.
John Geiger
We shall all respect the principle of each other and do nothing that would be regarded as an act oppression to any portion of the people
Alexander Mackenzie
In [David] Douglas's success in life ... his great activity, undaunted courage, singular abstemiousness, and energetic zeal, at once pointed him out as an individual eminently calculated to do himself credit as a scientific traveler.
Joseph Dalton Hooker
Grief is like a roller coaster. Somedays we feel up and other days we feel down.
Louise Suzanne Boyd
Watching that great ship fly up, and up, and up against the night was an awakening, a vivid flash of something like God, something more powerful than nature itself. And it is us. And we know. We who have seen.
Charles Pellegrino
One of the best safeguards of our hopes I have suggested is to be able to mark off the areas of hopelessness and to acknowledge them to face them directly not with despair but with the creative intent of keeping them from polluting all the areas of possibility.
William F. Lynch
Memory haunts me from age to age, and passion leads me by the hand--evil have I done, and with sorrow have I made acquaintance from age to age, and from age to age evil shall I do, and sorrow shall I know till my redemption comes.
H. Rider Haggard
No, there's going to be no even tenor with me. The more uneven it is the happier I shall be. And when my time comes to die, I'll be able to die happy, for I will have done and seen and heard and experienced all the joy, pain, thrills — every emotion that any human ever had — and I'll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed.” ― Richard Halliburton
Richard Halliburton
It's the not-yet in the now, the taste of the fruit that does not-yet exist, hanging the blossom on the bough.
Laurens van der Post
What a strange revelation of self-esteem it is when people only love those who think and feel as they do - an extension of themselves, in fact! Even Christianity does not cure us, since one cannot feel right without assuming that the rest must be wrong. Personally I would rather feel wrong with everybody else than right all by myself: I like people different, and agree with the man who said that the worst of the human race is the number of duplicates.
Freya Stark
The full measure of a culture embraces both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the metaphors that propel their lives. And no description of a people can be complete without reference to the character of their homeland, the ecological and geographical matrix in which they have determined to live out their destiny. Just as a landscape defines character, culture springs from a spirit of place.
Wade Davis
The difficult is what takes a little time. The impossible is what takes a little longer.
Fridtjof Nansen
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 red sands of Marrakesh, sprawling at the foot of the Atlas like a wounded Leviathan....
Rosita Forbes
Culture is not trivial. It is not a decoration or artifice, the songs we sing or even the prayers we chant. It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that ultimately has neither. Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insulates a people from the barbaric heart that lies just beneath the surface of all human societies and indeed all human beings. Culture alone allows us to reach, as Abraham Lincoln said, for the better angels of our nature.
Wade Davis
For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger, now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.
David Livingstone
I am above the forest region, amongst grand rocks & such a torrent as you see in Salvator Rosa's paintings vegetation all a scrub of rhodos. with Pines below me as thick & bad to get through as our Fuegian Fagi on the hill tops, & except the towering peaks of P. S. [perpetual snow] that, here shoot up on all hands there is little difference in the mt scenery—here however the blaze of Rhod. flowers and various colored jungle proclaims a differently constituted region in a naturalist's eye & twenty species here, to one there, always are asking me the vexed question, where do we come from?[Letter to Charles Darwin 24 Jun 1849]
Joseph Dalton Hooker
I can't write a book commensurate with Shakespeare but I can write a book by me.
Sir Walter Raleigh
Passion is like the lightening, it is beautiful and it links the earth to heaven, but it blinds.
H. Rider Haggard
False accusations of rape are a form of rape itself. . . . . The power to falsely accuse a man of rape is a coveted power that permits women to destroy a man with a mere accusation . . . . notwithstanding widespread propaganda to the contrary, the real rate of false accusations of rape, according to FBI statistics sixty percent (60%).
John Davis
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.
Richard Francis Burton
The philosophical study of nature endeavors, in the the vicissitudes of phenomena, to connect the present with the past.
Alexander von Humboldt
The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls. All the creatures that we to kill and eat, all those that we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls, souls that do not perish with the body and which must therefore be pacified lest they revenge themselves on us for taking away their bodies
Knud Rasmussen
I am not a coward, but I am so strong. So hard to die.
Meriwether Lewis
I have discovered that even the mediocre can have adventures and even the fearful can achieve.
Edmund Hillary
Every time you dive, you hope you'll see something new - some new species. Sometimes the ocean gives you a gift, sometimes it doesn't.
James Cameron
There is no doubt that we are a very cruel people,' Winston Churchill wrote home from the front. 'Severity always,' went the British motto, 'justice when possible.
Wade Davis
One must never look for happiness: one meets it by the way.
Isabelle Eberhardt
What a tricky and uncomfortable thing is conscience, that nearly always begins to trouble us at the moment of, or after, the event, not before, when it might be of some use.
H. Rider Haggard
Time after time have nations, ay, and rich and strong nations, learned in the arts, been, and passed away to be forgotten, so that no memory of them remains. This is but one of several; for Time eats up the works of man.
H. Rider Haggard
The measure of a society is not only what it does but the quality of its aspirations.
Wade Davis
We run to place and power over the dead bodies of those who fail and fall; ay, we win the food we eat from out the mouths of starving babes.
H. Rider Haggard
Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is lost, indeed, but the breath he breathed still stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he knew are our familiar friends--the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also!Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever.
H. Rider Haggard
Your time, energy and resources will get used no matter how well you focus them. By choosing to focus properly, you get the highest return for the efforts you invest in your life. Most people spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important. Productivity is not just about getting things done, it’s about getting the right things done.
John Geiger
...the holy men sat in an atmospherereeking of antiquity, so thick with thedust of ages that you can't see through it--nor can they.
Gertrude Bell
I was aware of Darwin's views fourteen years before I adopted them and I have done so solely and entirely from an independent study of the plants themselves.[Letter to W.H. Harvey]
Joseph Dalton Hooker
Nothing earthly will make me give up my work in despair.
David Livingstone
Borders? I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people.
Thor Heyerdahl