Quotes about Exploration

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

A novel is purposely a-philosophic, even anti-philosophic, fiercely independent of any system of preconceived ideas, it questions, it marvels, it doesn't judge, nor proclaims truths.

The larger the searchlight, the larger the searchlight of the unknown.

To achieve something that you have never achieved before, you must learn and practice qualities and skills that you have never had before.

Literature is a cake with many toys baked inside--and even if you find them all, if you don't enjoy the path that leads you to them, it will be a hollow accomplishment.

The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.

There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.

A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone.

Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.

Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds.

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.