Explorer Quotes

“You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.”
― Terence McKenna

“What is a Wanderess? Bound by no boundaries, contained by no countries, tamed by no time, she is the force of nature’s course.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“The best traveler is one without a camera.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“The only way I knew how to live the best day ever was on an expedition.”
― Hendri Coetzee

“How To Be An Explorer Of The World
1. Always Be LOOKING (notice the ground beneath your feet.)
2. Consider Everything Alive & Animate
3. EVERYTHING Is Interesting. Look Closer.
4. Alter Your Course Often.
5. Observe For Long Durations (and short ones).
6. Notice The Stories Going On Around You.
7. Notice PATTERNS. Make CONNECTIONS.
8. DOCUMENT Your Findings (field notes) In A VAriety Of Ways.
9. Incorporate Indeterminacy.
10. Observe Movement.
11. Create a Personal DIALOGUE With Your Environment. Talk to it.
12. Trace Things Back to Their ORIGINS.
13. Use ALL of the Senses In Your Investigations.”
― Keri Smith, How to Be an Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum

“I will go anywhere, provided it be forward.”
― David Livingstone

“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

“When a Wanderess has been caged,
or perched with her wings clipped,
She lives like a Stoic,
She lives most heroic,
smiling with ruby, moistened lips
once her cup of Death is welcome sipped.”
― Roman Payne

“Some 5,000 of Wallace’s 8,050 bird specimens he collected during eight years in the Malay Archipelago were actually collected by Ali. None are named after the young man.”
― Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, "Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion

“I wonder what Ali thought about Wallace? How did he view this tall, gawky, bearded eccentric man? Did Ali defend Wallace when villagers thought he was an evil demon? Did he secretly giggle when he heard Wallace speak Malay with a strong British accent? Did he gossip about his boss with other locals? Why was Wallace enthralled to discover a new beetle or ant? Did Ali see his time with Wallace as a chance to better himself, a grand adventure? Or was his work with Wallace simply a job?”
― Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, "Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion

“We know quite a bit about Alfred Russel Wallace, one of the great figures of modern science. But we know relatively little about Ali, Wallace’s faithful companion who supported him during much of his eight-year sojourn in the Malay Archipelago in the mid-19th century.”
― Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, "Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion

“Just as Wallace learned and evolved, Ali was on his own journey of discovery. Starting out as a 15-year-old cook, Ali learned to collect and mount specimens. He took on responsibility for organizing travel. He nursed Wallace during many bouts of fever and injury.”
― Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, "Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion

“One question that has challenged me for some 50 years, is where did Ali “retire” after parting with Wallace in Singapore in 1862? Did he return to his home in Sarawak? Did he return to the spice island of Ternate, where Wallace said he had a family?”
― Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, "Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion

“A key element in everyone’s hero’s journey is the “decision point,” the moment when, often following a crisis, the hero is confronted by a major choice, a crossroad, a life redirection, a safe or a risky option. Choose one path and your life changes in a certain way, choose another and you veer off into an alternate reality.”
― Paul Spencer Sochaczewski, "Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion

“I used to capture the vastness and the immensity of the world and confine it to the limited pages of the parchment.”
― Hark Herald Sarmiento

“For over a century, an evolving microcosm of Anthropology’s turbulent history has hidden behind the staid façade of the American Museum of Natural History. From an insider’s perspective, the well-known ethnologist Stan Freed engagingly introduces us to an amazing cast of explorers, eccentrics, idealists, pranksters and forbidding intellectual - an unlikely mix that played a key role in establishing the science of Anthropology as we know it today.”
― Ian Tattersall

“The sacredness of the world is that it pursued the light; the sanctity of the cave is that it never left the darkness”
― Brian S. Woods

“To go out into nature is to explore the mind of the creator.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“In 1891 Ade discovered a tiled archway in the shadows of the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, and returned with great golden disks she claimed were dragon scales. She visited Santiago and the Falklands, contracted malaria from Léopoldville, and disappeared for several months in the northeast corner of Maine. She accumulated the dust of other worlds on her skin like ten thousand perfumes, and left constellations of wistful men and impossible tales in her wake.
But she never lingered anywhere for long. Most observers told me she was simply a wanderer, driven to move from place to place by the same unknowable pressures that make swallows fly south, but I believe she was something closer to a knight on a quest. I believe she was looking for one particular door and one particular world.
In 1893, in the high, snowcapped spring of her twenty-seventh birthday, she found it.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“From Shanghai, Meyer had sent seeds and cuttings of oats, millet, a thin-skinned watermelon, and new types of cotton. The staff of Fairchild's office watched with anticipation each time one of Meyer's shipments were unpacked. There were seeds of wild pears, new persimmons, and leaves of so-called Manchurian spinach that America's top spinach specialist would declare was the best America had ever seen. Meyer had delivered the first samples of asparagus ever to officially enter the United States. In 1908, few people had seen a soybean, a green legume common in central China. Even fewer people could have imagined that within one hundred years, the evolved descendants of soybeans that Meyer shipped back would cover the Midwest of the United States like a rug. Soybeans would be applied to more diverse uses than any other crop in history, as feed for livestock, food for humans (notably vegetarians), and even a renewable fuel called biodiesel.
Meyer also hadn't come empty-handed. He had physically brought home a bounty, having taken from China a steamer of the Standard Oil Company that, unlike a passenger ship, allowed him limitless cargo and better onboard conditions for plant material. He arrived with twenty tons, including red blackberries, wild apricots, two large zelkova trees (similar to elms), Chinese holly shrub, twenty-two white-barked pines, eighteen forms of lilac, four viburnum bushes that produced edible red berries, two spirea bushes with little white flowers, a rhododendron bush with pink and purple flowers, an evergreen shrub called a daphne, thirty kinds of bamboo (some of them edible), four types of lilies, and a new strain of grassy lawn sedge.”
― Daniel Stone, The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats

“Astronomers are exploring outer-Space and I am exploring human-space.”
― Steven Magee

“Infinite possibilities are waiting for you, you just need to explore them.”
― Dax Bamania

“You know, medicines also expire.
So take that medicine before it expires. Otherwise, one day those medicines will also expire, then such medicines will not be found anywhere again.”
― Bhaskar Gautam

“Traveling to different places is always therapeutic".”
― Priyanshi Ranawat

“Make an expedition to your mind, for it is the most rewarding journey.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“But it should be remembered that the difficulties are great and the tale of disasters a long one, for the few remaining unknown corners of the world exact a price for their secrets.”
― Percy Harrison Fawcett

“For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton”
― Sir Raymond Priestly

“An explorer soon discovers that the world is full of busybodies righteously ready to save him, as they probably think, from himself. The only way to deal with such people is to agree to their terms and then go ahead as one pleases. There are enough legitimate discouragements in the world without submitting to artificial ones”
― Lincoln Ellsworth

“When it is darkest there is always light ahead”
― Roald Amundsen

“A good book we like, we explorers. That is our best amusement, and our best time killer”
― Roald Amundsen