In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas ... a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in explo...ring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else. He learns to see himself, but suddenly, pr...ovided he was honest, all the rest appears, and it is as rich as he was, and, as a final crowning, richer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The tourist is first of all an adventurer. The dream is of the pioneer, the explorer, the great voyager or the conquering emperor.... He leaves the security of home far behind and sets out beyond the perimeters of the known world for fame, fortune and excitement. He wants to take on the minotaur, scale the Matterhorn, discover a lost Amazonian tribe or sample the delights of a Thai brothel.... The essence of the tourist adventure is exhibited in the contours of the excitements that it provides. And these contours are best inferred from the stories that are told and re-told with animation to relatives, friends and colleagues at home. It is virtually never what has been seen that is recounted with enthusiasm. When the sites are described it is in the form of ritualized cliches: the Eiffel Tower really is a wonder--we went up it, and you get such a nice view. It is rather the personal moments of the tour, moments of near-crisis, that in retrospect were exciting: when one of the suitcases failed to arrive off the luggage chute at Frankfort Airport. Touring itself has been turned into a routine, restricting adventure to those moments when routine breaks down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Well, Philippe, he died because of his work. He was like an--like an explorer in a wild country where no one had ever been before.... He was searching for the truth, he almost found a great truth, but for one instant he was careless.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment. ... The explorer seeks the... undiscovered, the traveler that which has been discovered by the mind working in history,the tourist that which has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity. ... If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliché. It is between these two poles that the traveler mediates. ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Commercialism is the blemish on the fair face of American life. Fighting against the terrible conditions of the explorer and pione...er, our forefathers had little time to think of beauty. Hearts and heads became as hardened to the more gracious things of life as did their bodies against physical hardship. Little by little, as nature yielded before the dynamite of their wills, life began to express itself in the same hard terms, and the great commerce of a New World bent everything to its indomitable will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's sto...mach the separation from terra ... these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known ... this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is up to my spirit to find the truth. But how? Grave uncertainty, each time the spirit feels beyond its own comprehension; when... it, the explorer, is altogether to obscure land that it must search and where all its baggage is of no use. To search? That is not all: to create.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I would not, if I could, give up the memory of the joy I have had in books for any advantage that could be offered in other pursui...ts or occupations. Books have been to me what gold is to the miser, what new fields are to the explorer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not yet full;... so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »