Life is too short to not make explorations. And perhaps deep within you is an explorer of the great unknown. So let your mind and body discover new territories with these 116 exploration quotes.
Exploration Quotes
1. In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration. – Ansel Adams
2. We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. – T. S. Eliot
3. Exploration is the engine that drives innovation. Innovation drives economic growth. So let’s all go exploring. – Edith Widder
4. That is the exploration that awaits you! Not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence. – Leonard Nimoy
5. As beautiful as simplicity is, it can become a tradition that stands in the way of exploration. – Laura Nyro
6. Success is an act of exploration. That means the first thing you have to find is the unknown. Learning is searching; anything else is just waiting. – Dale Dauten
7. All that is happening in art is part of a process of exploration and discovery. I hope to live for a few more years so that I can catch glimpses of the oncoming future. – Joseph Plaskett
8. If I wasn’t doing this kind of exploration, I’d like to be doing some other kind of exploration. It might be more risky, or less risky, but, in the business of exploration, risk is part of the territory. – John L. Phillips
9. Exploration of the natural world begins in early childhood, flourishes in middle childhood, and continues in adolescence as a pleasure and a source of strength for social action. – David Sobel
10. Exploration is wired into our brains. If we can see the horizon, we want to know what’s beyond. – Buzz Aldrin
11. To be a true explorer is to carry on your exploration even if it takes you to a place you didn’t particularly plan to go to. – Lynne McTaggart
12. And so, these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, makes us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings. – Terence McKenna
13. Getting out of the comfortable path, that’s what exploration is all about. – Story Musgrave
14. Welcome to those who believe in the power of dreams and who would like to join me in my exploration of life. – Bertrand Piccard
15. As we explore the soul, it is important to remember that this exploration will take place within nature (the body), for that is where and what we are. – B.K.S. Iyengar
16. My work is an exploration of the self. I’ve always been concerned with how I’m living and how that reflects in the painting. – Jose Parla
17. Arts and the Sciences are a natural symbiosis. They stem from the same human existential impulse – exploration. Exploration of what lies beneath the surface, and re-confuguration of elements of what we call reality. – Wole Soyinka
18. Every exploration is an appropriation. – Roland Barthes
19. When I was young, I said to myself, “You’ve got to make the most of your life.” It’s all about taking risks. Push yourself to do as much exploration as possible. Find yourself. Because sometimes we think we’ve found ourselves, but it’s only part of ourselves we’ve found. We haven’t pushed ourselves far out there where we make mistakes and things don’t work out, but at least we’ve discovered something. I felt that’s what my life had to be. – Robert Redford
20. Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit. – Frank Borman
21. I want to know why I’m alive. I want to understand. It’s like exploration; it’s like someone being interested in a place and its history, digging into the earth and looking for it, searching – it’s a passion. – Juliette Binoche
22. For me, exploration is about that journey to the interior, into your own heart. I’m always wondering, how will I act at my moment of truth? Will I rise up and do what’s right, even if every fiber of my being is telling me otherwise? – Anne Bancroft
23. Mine is a quiet exploration—a quest for new meanings in color, texture and design. Even though I sometimes portray scenes of poor and struggling people, it is a great joy to paint. – Lois Mailou Jones
24. The life of faith is a daily exploration of the constant and countless ways in which Gods grace and love are experienced. – Eugene H. Peterson
25. Exploration by real people inspires us. – Stephen Hawking
26. Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted-not taught-to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself? – Michael Chabon
27. I think I was really naïve. I had no context to think about what I wanted to do. Each step was a next stage of exploration. – Paul Smith
28. Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else – above all, a travel bureau – arrange everything before-hand? – Richard Aldington
29. Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to teach us the real value of a job. – Victor Hugo
30. Exploration is a dirty game. – Tahir Shah
31. Exploration and experimentation of new ways of being, in isolation, does not support change. – Pamela McLean
32. The rain of curiosity falls all the time, and it is time we got drenched. – Rajesh
33. Fear of the unknown will always be overpowered by human desire toward exploration. Curiosity is the risk, whose gifts often pays off. – Mladen Djordjevic
34. Exploration, of course, is going to new places, but I don’t think we go to new places just solely to say: well, we’ve been there, and come back, interesting though it may be. To me, each time we go farther into space we should use that to do basic research basic research that can’t be done before you go there. – John Glenn
35. Speculation and the exploration of ideas beyond what we know with certainty are what lead to progress. – Lisa Randall
36. Exploration is what you do when you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s what scientists do every day. If a scientist already knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t be discovering anything, because they already knew what they were doing. – Neil deGrasse Tyson
37. Curiosity is the essence of human existence and exploration has been part of humankind for a long time. The exploration of space, like the exploration of life, if you will, is a risk. We’ve got to be willing to take it. – Gene Cernan
38. Exploration is a wonderful way to open our eyes to the world, and to truly see that impossible is just a word. – Richard Branson
39. Exploration is a quite legitimate purpose for a journey. You have the opportunity to learn the territories of the Upper and Lower Worlds and their assets, which you can employ as needed in the future. – Sandra Harner
40. Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars. – Carl Sagan
41. Ordinary exploration begins in the juiciest sort of indecision, in deliberate, then routine fits of absence of mind… Exploring requires the cloak of invisibility bicyclists and walkers take for granted. – John R. Stilgoe
42. Life is about growth and exploration, not achieving a fixed state of balance. You have a very limited time on earth to experience all that you can. Figuring out how to squeeze the most out of your family, work, and spirituality is your life’s purpose. Go do it. – Mel Robbins
43. I don’t begrudge my education but I wish I had started working on my own explorations sooner. – Judith D’Agostino
44. A journey solely to discover may fail while one of pure exploration rarely fails to enlighten. – Ian Semple
45. I believe in always being open to learning more through exploration of everything available and following one’s sense of curiosity, creativity, and playfulness. – Jay Woodman
46. Life is short. The world is big. It awaits your exploration. If you’re not living on the edge, you’re just taking up way too much space. – Paul Beaver
47. Life is very much about rule breaking, about confrontation. Otherwise history would just stand still. Someone has to come along and break the rules and try for whatever reason to go about things a different way. Even if it is a simple sense of adventure, a sense of exploration. You explore concepts and things that interest you, but you are also exploring inside of yourself. – Ed Paschke
48. Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit. – F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. Train yourselves. Don’t wait to be fed knowledge out of a book. Get out and seek it. Make explorations. Do your own research work. Train your hands and your mind. Become curious. Invent your own problems and solve them. You can see things going on all about you. Inquire into them. Seek out answers to your own questions. There are many phenomena going on in nature the explanation of which cannot be found in books. Find out why these phenomena take place. Information a boy gets by himself is enormously more valuable than that which is taught to him in school. – Irving Langmuir
50. We are beginning to realize that even the most fortunate people are living far below capacity, and that most human beings develop not more than a small fraction of their potential mental and spiritual efficiency. The human race, in fact, is surrounded by a large area of unrealized possibilities, a challenge to the spirit of exploration. – Julian Huxley
51. The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one’s own potentialities. – Colin Wilson
52. Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. – E. L. Doctorow
53. Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it’s not science, it’s an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers. – Tim O’Brien
54. We need people pushing the boundaries. Exploration is what we, as humans, do. – Heidi Hammel
55. People go on exploration; they’re trying to find places that weren’t known before. But it is an inevitable fact of research, as is in any other form of exploration of the unknown, that some people find they go down a dead end. – Mark Walport
56. I honestly do think that it is critical that we are continuously breaking records, because that represents us moving forward in exploration. – Peggy Whitson
57. Perhaps you could say that mountaineers are driven by ego or our competitiveness, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Whether it’s a huge face in the Himalaya or some crag in the woods behind your house, exploration offers us a unique perspective on the world that you can’t really find anywhere else. – Conrad Anker
58. Science is exploration. The fundamental nature of exploration is that we don’t know what’s there. We can guess and hope and aim to find out certain things, but we have to expect surprises. – Charles H. Townes
59. Exploration is an oft-lauded human activity, and one that resonates in the same way that music and good stories do. It’s hard-wired into our species (and into many others), no doubt because it has survival value. Exploration occasionally rewards those who accept its risks, usually with new resources. – Seth Shostak
60. Exploration is the sport of the scientist. – Auguste Piccard
61. The scientist and the artist are both passionate about their exploration. What leads to my work is that I’m equally an artist and an engineer. – Arthur Ganson
62. We risk great peril if we kill off this spirit of adventure, for we cannot predict how and in what seemingly unrelated fields it will manifest itself. A nation that loses its forward thrust is in danger, and one of the most effective ways to retain that thrust is to keep exploring possibilities. The sense of exploration is intimately bound up with human resolve, and for a nation to believe that it is still committed to a forward motion is to ensure its continuance. – James A. Michener
63. Theory provides the maps that turn an uncoordinated set of experiments or computer simulations into a cumulative exploration. – David E. Goldberg
64. Science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. – Freeman Dyson
65. It’s human nature to stretch, to go, to see, to understand. Exploration is not a choice, really; it’s an imperative. – Michael Collins
66. Exploration is curiosity put into action. – Don Walsh
67. For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I’m surprised where the journey takes me. – Jack Dann
68. The beginner’s humility and openness lead to exploration. Exploration leads to accomplishment. All of it begins at the beginning, with the first small and scary step. – Julia Cameron
69. The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration. – Jose Ortega y Gasset
70. No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit. – Helen Keller
71. All exploration — physical or intellectual — is an act of transgression, of crossing boundaries. – Lesley Hazleton
72. Until you cross the bridge of your insecurities, you can’t begin to explore your possibilities. – Tim Fargo
73. Stop defining travel by the distance the destination is from your departure or the length of time you will be away from home. Instead characterize it as a journey of exploration, relaxation, adventure, and learning. – Annette White
74. Not all who wander are lost. – J R R Tolkien
75. You can accelerate your development by giving yourself a fresh set of challenges, or the same set viewed from a different angle, every day. Explore a different path – if it’s a dead end, explore another. – Paul Foxton
76. Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. – Andre Gide
77. Successful creative adults seem to combine the wide-ranging exploration and openness we see in children with the focus and discipline we see in adults. – Alison Gopnik
78. We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey. – John Hope Franklin
79. As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. – Herman Melville
80. A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree, one is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander. – Roman Payne
81. …I try to incorporate life’s lessons from everyone around me and pay it forward anytime I can. I look at every person I meet as a new and thrilling experience with which I’m gifted. Every new city or country or continent that I visit is a beautiful exploration from which I can learn. Every new client or project represents the possibility of meeting new people and having new adventures. – Andrea Michaels
82. When you’ve managed to stumble directly into the heart of the unknown – either through the misdirection of others, or better yet, through your own creative ineptitude – there is no one there to hold your hand or tell you what to do. In those bad lost moments, in the times when are advised not to panic, we own the unknown, and the world belongs to us. The child within has full reign. Few of us are ever so free. – Tim Cahill
83. There are cracks to other worlds, places in our daily existence where you can pry the walls open and arrive on the other side—if you can get your fingers around the edges. – Derek Franz
84. Become exhaustingly curious. – Maureen Joyce Connolly
85. When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains. – Rebecca Solnit
86. ‘You might be surprised,’ she laughed. ‘Maybe life as you know it has shifted. But just because you’re lost doesn’t mean you can’t explore. – Clara Bensen
87. Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. – Neil Gaiman
88. Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name. – Samuel Butler
89. Stand up; Grow up and Climb up. The reason why you can’t see farther and further is because you didn’t climb higher. Be willing to explore and be informed! – Israelmore Ayivor
90. Many of us spend our entire lives in the same bubble – we surround ourselves with people who share our opinions, speak the way we speak, and look the way we look. We fear leaving those familiar surroundings, which is natural, but through exploration of the unfamiliar we stop focusing on the labels that define WHAT we are and discover WHO we are. – Adam Braun
91. When we truly love ourselves and love life, we are compelled to deeply explore ourselves and life’s possibilities. – Bryant McGill
92. Explore your own innermost thoughts to create content that will evoke deeply relatable emotions and passion in others. – Ken Poirot
93. Part of the urge to explore is a desire to become lost. – Tracy Johnston
94. Writing is all at once an exploration of what is, and what is not. Of the known, and the unknown. A journey into the depths of self, and all of humankind. – Madelaine Standing
95. The depth of a man is a limit only he can know, should he have the courage to explore into the dark. – Kyle Schmalenberg
96. Before he goes into the water, a diver cannot know what he will bring back. – Max Ernst
97. The perfect journey is never finished, the goal is always just across the next river, round the shoulder of the next mountain. There is always one more track to follow, one more mirage to explore. – Rosita Forbes
98. ‘No,’ she says, as if the suggestion is ridiculous. ‘I wouldn’t go back to where I’m from. I’d go someplace I’ve never been.’ – Ally Condie
99. So, you know, I think the age of exploration is just beginning, not ending, on our planet. – Robert Ballard
100. A lot of people ask…why a man is willing to risk… Well, we’ve got to do it. We’re going into an age of exploration that will be bigger than anything the world has ever seen… If a man faces up to the (unknown) and takes the dare of the future, he can have some control over his destiny. – John Glenn
101. Wherever you go, go with all your heart. – Confucius
102. No place is ever as bad as they tell you it’s going to be. – Chuck Thompson
103. The more people explore the world, the more they realize in every country there’s a different aesthetic. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. – Helena Christensen
104. There are many spokes on the wheel of life. First, we’re here to explore new possibilities. – Ray Charles
105. In any field, find the strangest thing, and then explore it. – John Archibald Wheeler
106. Time to open up a new chapter in life, and to explore a larger center. – Lillian Russell
107. Allow your mind to wander in this vast infinite universe and explore its wonder. – Jehan Fostanes Nayga
108. Go out and explore what you have not, because this is the only opportunity in your life. – Natan Quirino
109. Ideas are amazing, without the exploration of an idea, we can never know if that idea could become a reality. – Jeremy Limn
110. What lies in future is always mystery. Don’t be afraid to explore what is in present. Take the situation in stride and move forward. – Anil Sinha
111. It is our duty to explore the unknown. Only by taking risks can we grow as individuals. – Edwin Mamerto
112. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. – Ritu Ghatourey
113. The difficult part of the process is the long exploration and discovery of your own soul and living with the results. – Mike Svob
114. Exploration … no longer seemed aimed at some outward discovery; rather, it was directed inward … – David Grann
115. I have come to see that exploration is not a practice of the unfaithful, but rather is exactly what being a follower of Christ is actually all about. – Brandan Roberston
116. Life is an empowered exploration towards consciousness development. – Simion Hurghis