exploration & travel18 quotes

“There is no happiness for the man who does not travel. Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a sinner. For Indra is the friend of the traveller. Therefore wander!”

“Of the gladest moments in human life, methinks is the departure upon a distant journey to unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the Slavery of Home, man feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood....afresh dawns the morn of life…”

“But a strong desire over took me to go away, to take a plane out that morning, to go to Mexico, as Arthur had once done, and live irresponsibly in a little pink hotel; or to Italy, to sleep through blinding afternoons in a half fallen villa; or to vanish into the railroad wastes of North America. My only commerce would be with prostitutes and bartenders. I would send postcards without a return address.”

“I quit my job in the ‘art world’ and went back to the dry places: alone, travelling light. The names of the tribes I travelled among are unimportant: Rguibat, Quashgai, Taimanni, Turkomen, Bororo, Tuareg—people whose journeys, unlike my own, had neither beginning nor end. I slept in black tents, blue tents, skin tents, yurts of felt and windbreaks of thorns. One night, caught in a sandstorm in the Western Sahara, I understood Muhammed’s dictum, ‘A journey is a fragment of Hell.’

The more I read, the more convinced I became that nomads had been the crankhandle of history, if for no other reason than that the great monotheisms had, all of them, surfaced from the pastoral milieu...”

“The Bushmen, who walk immense distances across the Kalahari, have no idea of the soul’s survival in another world. ‘When we die, we die, they say. The wind blows away our foot prints, and that is the end of us.’ Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians—with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds—project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.”

“The Hero Cycle, wherever found, is a story of ‘fitness’ in the Darwinian sense: a blueprint for genetic ‘success’. Beowulf leaves... Ivan leaves... Jack leaves... the young Aboriginal on Walkabout leaves... even the antique Don Quixote leaves, And these Wanderjahre, and combats with the Beast, are the story-teller’s version of the incest taboo; whereby a man must first prove ‘fitness’ and then must ‘marry far.

In practice, it scarcely matters whether myths are the coded messages of instinct, whose structures will reside in the central nervous system, or tales of instruction handed down from the Year Dot. One point cannot be emphasised too strongly. Seldom, if ever, in myth, is it desirable, morally, for a man to kill a man in cold blood.”

“As I have always held it a crime to anticipate evils I will believe it a good comfortable road untill I am conpelled to beleive differently.”

“Although modern man rarely questions the value of exploration, the explorer pursues a course of activity that seems, logically, at variance with man’s basic strivings for the good life, the best obtainable in food, shelter, and all those other physical, mental and spiritual comforts that characterize civilized life. The explorer deliberately turns his back on civilization and its pleasures simply to go and see unknown lands. Yet the explorer is always a civilized man; exploration itself is an advanced intellectual concept. The primitive or half-civilized man may move into new lands for food, protection or trade, but he is always driven there by necessity or greed and rarely troubles to record what he has seen. The true explorer goes only to see and to tell others what he has seen. It seems incredible, considering the hardships and dangers, that men would willingly do this. I speak of men rather than women because the spirit of adventure that leads to exploration is primarily a masculine trait; women, being more sensible and their curiosity being confined to more personal and realistic matters nearer home, are less afflicted by the desire to see what lies beyond the seas and mountain ranges. But this spirit lurks in all men, I would guess, to a greater or lesser degree. In some it is weak and easily satisfied by novels or television; in others it is a ruling passion that thrusts them to the remote corners of the globe.”

“If a man can keep alert and imaginative, an error is a possibility, a chance at something new; to him, wandering and wondering are part of the same process, and he is most mistaken, most in error, whenever he quits exploring.”

“To the rider of back roads, nothing shows the tone, the voice of a small town more quickly than the breakfast grill or the five-thirty tavern.”

“With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the open road in search of places where change did not mean ruin, and where time and men and deeds connected.”

“The world reveals itself to people who travel by foot.”

“Constant discovery is the eternal joy of the ahistorical.”

“I will follow my instincts, be myself for good or ill, and see what will be the upshot. As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.”

“We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.”

“Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”

“Our minds, our souls, our bodies work most efficiently, most profoundly, most happily, when moving and, in particular, walking. Modern civilization imprisons us in offices, and treats tramps, Gypsies, mystics, and nomads as misfits. But in fact these wanderers are in tune with an ancient and more natural form of human life. It is homes and cities and sedentary jobs that are unnatural. To find yourself, you must travel.”

“If he would express the sight in colour the artist would use soft pastels for the plains to the west and south, harsh black-purple for the cliffs to the north and east. To express it in music the conductor would bring out the soul of the strings for the west and south, and force the brass to explode and the percussion to thunder for the north and east. To put it in words the poet would create a sigh for the west and south and a hostile fatalism for the north and east. To report on it technically the geologist would describe rolling, grass-covered savannas to the west and south, ending abruptly in two gigantic rock table-moun-tains to the north and east.”