Explore Quotes

“Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library.”
― Walter Savage Landor, Pericles and Aspasia

“None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“True friends don't come with conditions.”
― Aaron Lauritsen, 100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip

“Without struggle, success has no value.”
― Aaron Lauritsen, 100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip

“You need mountains, long staircases don't make good hikers.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“The only cure to all this madness; is too dream, far and wide, if possibility doesn't knock, create a damn door. If the shoe doesn't fit, don't make it. If the journey your travelling seems to far fetched and wild beyond your imagination; continue on it, great things come to the risk takers. And last but not least, live today; here, right now, you'll thank your future self for it later.”
― Nikki Rowe

“Those who achieve the extraordinary are usually the most ordinary because they have nothing to prove to anybody. Be Humble.”
― Aaron Lauritsen, 100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip

“At some point, you just gotta forgive the past, your happiness hinges on it.”
― Aaron Lauritsen, 100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip

“I’m not up for laughing, but their laughter makes the room feel safer, so we begin to explore.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“We only know a tiny proportion about the complexity of the natural world. Wherever you look, there are still things we don’t know about and don’t understand. [...] There are always new things to find out if you go looking for them.”
― David Attenborough

“May your day be filled with joy with a sprinkling of positivity on top.”
― C. Toni Graham

“I follow and cultivate my own curiosity. I think curiosity is one of the top two or three human characteristics. It's something that I really like about myself. [...] I want to understand stuff! I want to understand people! Following my curiosity so frequently leads me to better life decisions and better business decisions but also - just feeling better! You're never going to feel bad about your whole life if you loved people and you were curious. I mean, that's kind of all I want!”
― Hank Green

“Tolerance doesn’t mean to accept, believe, understand, agree or ignore. Tolerance means yielding to beliefs that are not your own without judgement or condemnation.”
― C. Toni Graham

“If you didn't earn something, it's not worth flaunting.”
― Aaron Lauritsen, 100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip

“It’s the ‘everyday’ experiences we encounter along the journey to who we wanna be that will define who we are when we get there.”
― Aaron Lauritsen, 100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip

“He hadn’t factored in her being hundreds of miles away from home with no family or friends. I’ve been a complete wanker, he chastised himself. “Bloody hell, I hadn’t taken that into account. Maybe Kat’s right,” he remarked, fixated on the TV.   ”
― Sharon Carter, Love Auction II: Love Designs

“The “facts” about Ali’s life are few, and come from Wallace’s writing. Wallace was a careful writer, but he naturally wrote through his own perceptions, memories, and filters.”
― Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, "Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion

“Don’t dwell too much on the past. The lessons are useful for the present and a preparation for the future. Move on!”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“Walking causes a repetitive, spontaneous poetry to rise naturally to the lips, words as simple as the sound of footsteps on the road. There also seems to be an echo of walking in the practice of two choruses singing a psalm in alternate verses, each on a single note, a practice that makes it possible to chant and listen by turns. Its main effect is one of repetition and alternation that St Ambrose compared to the sound of the sea: when a gentle surf is breaking quietly on the shore the regularity of the sound doesn’t break the silence, but structures it and renders it audible. Psalmody in the same way, in the to-and-fro of alternating responses, produces (Ambrose said) a happy tranquillity in the soul. The echoing chants, the ebb and flow of waves recall the alternating movement of walking legs: not to shatter but to make the world’s presence palpable and keep time with it. And just as Claudel said that sound renders silence accessible and useful, it ought to be said that walking renders presence accessible and useful.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“The Native Americans, whose wisdom Thoreau admired, regarded the Earth itself as a sacred source of energy. To stretch out on it brought repose, to sit on the ground ensured greater wisdom in councils, to walk in contact with its gravity gave strength and endurance. The Earth was an inexhaustible well of strength: because it was the original Mother, the feeder, but also because it enclosed in its bosom all the dead ancestors. It was the element in which transmission took place. Thus, instead of stretching their hands skyward to implore the mercy of celestial divinities, American Indians preferred to walk barefoot on the Earth: The Lakota was a true Naturist – a lover of Nature. He loved the earth and all things of the earth, the attachment growing with age. The old people came literally to love the soil and they sat or reclined on the ground with a feeling of being close to a mothering power. It was good for the skin to touch the earth and the old people liked to remove their moccasins and walk with bare feet on the sacred earth. Their tipis were built upon the earth and their altars were made of earth. The birds that flew in the air came to rest on the earth and it was the final abiding place of all things that lived and grew. The soil was soothing, strengthening, cleansing and healing. That is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life-giving forces. For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him. Walking, by virtue of having the earth’s support, feeling its gravity, resting on it with every step, is very like a continuous breathing in of energy. But the earth’s force is not transmitted only in the manner of a radiation climbing through the legs. It is also through the coincidence of circulations: walking is movement, the heart beats more strongly, with a more ample beat, the blood circulates faster and more powerfully than when the body is at rest. And the earth’s rhythms draw that along, they echo and respond to each other. A last source of energy, after the heart and the Earth, is landscapes. They summon the walker and make him at home: the hills, the colours, the trees all confirm it. The charm of a twisting path among hills, the beauty of vine fields in autumn, like purple and gold scarves, the silvery glitter of olive leaves against a defining summer sky, the immensity of perfectly sliced glaciers … all these things support, transport and nourish us.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“If you appreciate, perpetuate and explore your own dreams,
then you'll know that dream isn't a one-way communication.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“I know so much is going to happen here, but I just don't know how. It feels like Paris is full of so many adventures just waiting to be had.”
― Rachel Kapelke-Dale, Graduates in Wonderland: The International Misadventures of Two (Almost) Adults

“Slowness means cleaving perfectly to time, so closely that the seconds fall one by one, drop by drop like the steady dripping of a tap on stone. This stretching of time deepens space. It is one of the secrets of walking: a slow approach to landscapes that gradually renders them familiar. Like the regular encounters that deepen friendship.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Blinding, mineral, shattering silence. You hear nothing but the quiet crunch of stones underfoot. An implacable, definitive silence, like a transparent death. Sky of a perfectly detached blue. You advance with eyes down, reassuring yourself sometimes with a silent mumbling. Cloudless sky, limestone slabs filled with presence: silence nothing can sidestep. Silence fulfilled, vibrant immobility, tensed like a bow. There’s the silence of early morning. For long routes in autumn you have to start very early. Outside everything is violet, the dim light slanting through red and gold leaves. It is an expectant silence. You walk softly among huge dark trees, still swathed in traces of blue night. You are almost afraid of awakening. Everything whispering quietly. There’s the silence of walks through the snow, muffled footsteps under a white sky. All around you nothing moves. Things and even time itself are iced up, frozen solid in silent immobility. Everything is stopped, unified, thickly padded. A watching silence, white, fluffy, suspended as if in parentheses.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“But walking causes absorption. Walking interminably, taking in through your pores the height of the mountains when you are confronting them at length, breathing in the shape of the hills for hours at a time during a slow descent. The body becomes steeped in the earth it treads. And thus, gradually, it stops being in the landscape: it becomes the landscape. That doesn’t have to mean dissolution, as if the walker were fading away to become a mere inflection, a footnote. It’s more a flashing moment: sudden flame, time catching fire. And here, the feeling of eternity is all at once that vibration between presences. Eternity, here, in a spark.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Ms Rowanberg’s with you? Good, so you got her out? How is she? ” He didn’t realise that his flurry of eager questions were a definite tell, but the Lieutenant pretended not to notice.
“Annoyed, sir.” The Lieutenant chuckled. “She was looking forward to taking out her anger on her captors, but I’m afraid we denied her that privilege. The five we got are not answering any calls now.”
“Good,” James spat, and under his breath he added, “F*cking bastards.” He thought no one heard him, and he didn’t see the Lieutenant struggling not to grin.
So he’s one of us after all, mused the Lieutenant.”
― Patrick G Cox, First into the Fray

“You can never know who you really are or what you can do until you discover yourself”
― Sunday Adelaja

“... better to find out once and for all than to spend the rest of the summer, or my life perhaps, arguing with my body...”
― André Aciman

“A world in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men: Seven Lectures

“Все пак да живееш на границата може и да не е толкова стресиращо. Границата вероятно ти позволява да видиш два различни свята. Може би да си на границата значи да си част и от двата. Може би тръпката на Рио е в това да прескачаш локви и хартиени боклуци, за да видиш зад стената празник на музиката и душата.”
― Бистра Якимова, Магията на пътуването: Последвай местните