Inspirational Quotes

There’s no research like the research you’re doing when you think you’re enjoying yourself.

Terry Pratchett

“It’s not that plotting the whole journey is undesirable.  It’s that it’s impossible.  When you’re at the beginning, don’t obsess about the middle, because the middle is going to look different once you get there.  Just look for a strong beginning and a strong ending, and get moving.”

Chip & Dan heath, The Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Much in the universe baffled me, yet I knew I could pry the answers out of books if I lived & studied longer. Geology, for example. Just how did these ancient sediments & stratifications get crystallised & upheaved into granite peaks? Geography — just what would Scott & Shackleton & Borchgrevink find in the great white antarctic on their next expeditions … which I could – if I wished – live to see described? … As I contemplated an exit without further knowledge I became uncomfortably conscious of what I didn’t know. Tantalising gaps existed everywhere. … What of the vast gulfs of space outside all familiar lands?”

H.P. Lovecraft, describing why he decided not to commit suicide as a young man.

“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”

Leonard Bernstein (possibly quoting someone else)

“Bloody explorers.  Ponce off to mumbo-jumbo land and arrive home with a tropical disease, a suntan, and a bag of brown lumpy things, and Bob’s your uncle and everyone’s got a picture of them in the lavatory.  I mean, what about all the people who do all the work?”

Edmund Blackadder

Somewhere in the frozen wasteland

“For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”

 Sir Raymond Priestly, Antarctic Explorer and Geologist.

“You shall forget these things, toiling in the household,
You shall remember them, droning by the fire,
When age and forgetfulness sweeten memory
Only like a dream that has often been told
And often been changed in the telling.  They will seem unreal.
Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

-T. S. Eliot

It is up to us whether we subordinate ourselves to god, nature, or other persons.

A saying I made up, then printed out and taped over my desk, in high school

It’s never too late to be who you might have been.

George Elliot

If discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It opens you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning.

Jed Jenkins

You already know
What you need to be doing
And it isn’t this

A haiku about self-care

“No man is brave that has never walked 100 miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than a mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.”

Patrick Rothfuss

Your second life begins when you realize you only have one.

Raphaelle Giordano