exploration

Sharing the fun of fishing turns strangers into friends in a few hours. Whether you sit with native fishermen in their boat and fish with nets and lines or dive under the sea with them - they will lead you to the haunts of the specimens you desire and you could not find yourself in safer and more enjoyable company.

It is possible to be too stable. No Outer World has colonized a new planet in two and a half centuries.. are lives too long to risk and too comfortable to upset.__ don__ know about that, Dr. Fastolfe. You__e come to Earth. You risk disease.___es, I do. There are some of us, Mr. Baley, who feel that the future of the human race is even worth the possible loss of an extended lifetime. Too few of us, I am sorry to say.___n trying to introduce robots here on Earth, we__e doing our best to upset the balance of your City economy.___ou mean you__e creating a growing group of displaced and declassified men on purpose?___ot out of cruelty or callousness, believe me. A group of displaced men, as you call them, are what we need to serve as a nucleus for colonization. Your ancient America was discovered by ships fitted out with men from the prisons. Don__ you see that the City__ womb has failed the displaced man. He has nothing to lose and worlds to gain by leaving Earth.

We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.

In science ... "discovery" can mean finding a guppy with an extra spine in its dorsal fin.

These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home.

If and when all the laws governing physical phenomena are finally discovered, and all the empirical constants occurring in these laws are finally expressed through the four independent basic constants, we will be able to say that physical science has reached its end, that no excitement is left in further explorations, and that all that remains to a physicist is either tedious work on minor details or the self-educational study and adoration of the magnificence of the completed system. At that stage physical science will enter from the epoch of Columbus and Magellan into the epoch of the National Geographic Magazine!

Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer.

Once we lose our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe which dwarfs -- in time, in space, and in potential -- the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.

Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.

The Cosmos extends, for all practical purposes, forever. After a brief sedentary hiatus, we are resuming our ancient nomadic way of life. Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds throughout the Solar System and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the Universe come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.

Whatever territory you choose to explore and then invest all your time into it, you will be amazed how easy it is to become great.

We often hear about stepping outside ourselves, but rarely about stepping outside our generation.

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

...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.

I wonder if more students would do better in elementary and high school if teachers taught more about individual exploration of subjects and less about sliding smoothly along observational ruts. Exploration is a liberal art, because it is an art that liberates, that frees, that opens away from narrowness. And it is fun.

On building homes for fallen angels:When I was small - I sought a home,a place to go and rest my bones.Then founded something, of my own,I lived among the restless stones.If seeking leads you back to evil,what good is that, I asked a weevil.He said a home is what you make,it can't be real, if it is fake...And if you wait instead of seek,will you find love, or something bleak?I know (myself) for I have found,a beauty, hidden _ in a sound.Waiting is boring.And so is exploring.A smile is sometimes all it takes.And then your whole world simply breaks.

The known is finite, the unknown is infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to claim a little more land.

America is the spirit of human exploration distilled.