Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once.

Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature’s forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.

The balloons only have one life and the only way of finding out whether they work is to attempt to fly around the world.

The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.

Even Hubble hasn’t found yet the end of this universe, and we don’t know that it has any end.

An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.

U2’s best work has always been when we didn’t know what we’re doing.

I’ve been here before and will come again, but I’m not going this trip through.

My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we’ve had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.

I need more sex, OK? Before I die I wanna taste everyone in the world.

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.

Hong Kong is a wonderful, mixed-up town where you’ve got great food and adventure. First and foremost, it’s a great place to experience China in a relatively accessible way.

Never lose a holy curiosity.

The Indians on board said that thence to Cuba was a voyage in their canoes of a day and a half; these being small dug-outs without a sail. Such are their canoes. I departed thence for Cuba, for by the signs the Indians made of its greatness, and of its gold and pearls, I thought that it must be Cipango.

When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.

We are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we suspect.

I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.

Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.

There could be shadow galaxies, shadow stars, and even shadow people.

We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences, and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves: nothing original, pristine, clear.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn’t that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I’d already been translating French poetry, I’d been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.

Yeah, I like to keep myself interested – I’ll kind of throw myself into some area that I don’t completely know or understand, that I’m not adept at, so I’m forced to swim in order to stay afloat. There’s a good feeling that comes from that.

It is better to travel well than to arrive.

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn’t even nothing or once.

In the history of medicine, it is not always the great scientist or the learned doctor who goes forward to discover new fields, new avenues, new ideas.

We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.

I’ve been everywhere in the world, seen everything, had everything a man can have.

Going to Southeast Asia for the first time and tasting that spectrum of flavors – that certainly changed my whole palate, the kind of foods I crave. A lot of the dishes I used to love became boring to me.

Amazon.com strives to be the e-commerce destination where consumers can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.

Of course humans like to explore, and we should. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s more than that. It’s essential for your children and your children’s children.

The traveller has reached the end of the journey!

Listen; there’s a hell of a good universe next door: let’s go.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

We have one planet in our solar system that’s habitable, and that’s the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all, by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things.

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

Here ends my forever memorable first High Sierra excursion. I have crossed the Range of Light, surely the brightest and best of all the Lord has built. And, rejoicing in its glory, I gladly, gratefully, hopefully pray I may see it again.

No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before.

The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.

The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.

There’s a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you’re self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn’t so easy in a car, and you can’t cover as much ground walking.

I put up my thumb and it blotted out the planet Earth.

Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.

Women have a certain sexuality, and I think their bodies are beautiful, and I’m not embarrassed to explore that in a film. But there are things you get offered that are vulgar and violent – just like there’s a side of me that’s vulgar and violent.

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

I love to travel, but hate to arrive.

Any East Coast road trip we have is very exciting, just being on the road, taking it all in.

I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.

The pursuit of science leads only to the insoluble.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.

What goes on inside a star is better understood than one might guess from the difficulty of having to look at a little dot of light through a telescope, because we can calculate what the atoms in the stars should do in most circumstances.

I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‚Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.‘

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.