Quotes about voyage (151 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

H.P. Lovecraft book The Call of Cthulhu

Variant: We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
Source: The Call of Cthulhu

Sea

“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

William Shakespeare Julius Caesar

Brutus, Act IV, scene iii.
Source: Julius Caesar (1599)

Life , Men

“Weep for me, whoever has charity, truth and justice! I did not come on this voyage for gain, honor or wealth, that is certain; for then the hope of all such things was dead. I came to Your Highnesses with honest purpose and sincere zeal; and I do not lie. I humbly beseech You Highnesses that, if it please God to remove me hence, you will help me to go to Rome and on other pilgrimages.”

Cristoforo Colombo (1451–1506) Explorer, navigator, and colonizer

Letter to the Sovereigns (1503)

God , Truth , Lie , Justice

“This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some--perhaps many--may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

World , Hope , Music , Way

“Am going to cross Pacific on a wooden raft to support a theory that the South Sea islands were peopled from Peru. Will you come? I guarantee nothing but a free trip to Peru and the South Sea islands and back, but you will find good use for your technical abilities on the voyage. Reply at once.'

Next day the following telegram arrived from Torstein:

COMING. TORSTEIN.”

Thor Heyerdahl (1914–2002) Norwegian anthropologist and adventurer

People , Support , Sea

“Being responsible is taking ownership of your life. It means you have taken the first radical step to becoming a complete human being—fully conscious and fully human. In taking responsibility and beginning the journey toward conscious living, you are putting an end to the age-old patterns of assigning blame outward or heavenward. You have begun the greatest adventure life has to offer: the voyage inward.”

Sadhguru book Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Source: Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Life , Age

“A mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Sea

“Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.”

Tennessee Williams Camino Real

Source: Camino Real

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

H.P. Lovecraft book The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

Source: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

World , Thinking , Sea

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Books , Time , Reading , Personality

“Like them you are tall and taciturn, and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.”

Pablo Neruda book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Sadness

“I do differ from you radically in respect to familiar things & scenes; for I always demand close correlation with the landscape & historic stream to which I belong, & would feel completely lost in infinity without a system of reference-points based on known & accustomed objects. I take complete relativity so much for granted, that I cannot conceive of anything as existing in itself in any recognisable form. What gives things an aspect & quasi-significance to us is the fact that we view things consistently from a certain artificial & fortuitous angle. Without the preservation of that angle, coherent consciousness & entity itself becomes inconceivable. Thus my wish for freedom is not so much a wish to put all terrestrial things behind me & plunge forever into abysses beyond light, matter, & energy. That, indeed, would mean annihilation as a personality rather than liberation. My wish is perhaps best defined as a wish for infinite visioning & voyaging power, yet without loss of the familiar background which gives all things significance. I want to know what stretches Outside, & be able to visit all the gulfs & dimensions beyond Space & Time. I want, too, to juggle the calendar at will; bringing things from the immemorial past down into the present, & making long journeys into the forgotten years. But I want the familiar Old Providence of my childhood as a perpetual base for these necromancies & excursions—& in a good part of these necromancies & excursions I want certain transmuted features of Old Providence to form part of the alien voids I visit or conjure up. I am as geographic-minded as a cat—places are everything to me. Long observation has shewn me that no other objective experience can give me even a quarter of the kick I can extract from the sight of a fresh landscape or urban vista whose antiquity & historic linkages are such as to correspond with certain fixed childhood dream-patterns of mine. Of course my twilight cosmos of half-familiar, fleetingly remembered marvels is just as unattainable as your Ultimate Abysses—this being the real secret of its fascination. Nothing really known can continue to be acutely fascinating—the charm of many familiar things being mainly resident in their power to symbolise or suggest unknown extensions & overtones.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Clark Ashton Smith (7 November 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 214
Non-Fiction, Letters

Secret , Dreams , Feeling , Cats

“Thus ends the voyage under the seas. What passed during that night — how the boat escaped from the eddies of the maelstrom — how Ned Land, Conseil, and myself ever came out of the gulf, I cannot tell.”

Jules Verne book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Voici la conclusion de ce voyage sous les mers. Ce qui se passa pendant cette nuit, comment le canot échappa au formidable remous du Maelstrom, comment Ned Land, Conseil et moi, nous sortîmes du gouffre, je ne saurai le dire.
Part II, ch. XXIII: Conclusion
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)

Sea , Night

“In 1946, when I was still an adolescent, I went and signed my name on the other side of the sky during a fantastic 'realistico-imaginary' voyage.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

Source: before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings", p. 14

“You mustn't feel sorry for me. Don't you see I'm happy at last — free — free! — freed from the farm — free to wander on and on — eternally! Look! Isn't it beautiful beyond the hills? I can hear the old voices calling me to come — And this time I'm going! It isn't the end. It's a free beginning — the start of my voyage! I've won to my trip — the right of release — beyond the horizon! Oh, you ought to be glad — glad — for my sake!”

Eugene O'Neill Beyond the Horizon

Robert: Act 3, Scene 2
Beyond the Horizon (1918)

Beauty , Feeling , Time , Happiness

“I am a sincere Catholic as it were Corneille, Racine, La Bruyère, Bossnet, Bourdaloue, Fènelon, as were and still are so many of the most of the honor of out science, philosophy and literature, and have conferred such brilliant ustre on our Academies. I share the deep conviction openly manifested in words, deeds and writings by so many savants of the first rank, by a Ruffini, a Haüy, a Laënnec, an Ampere, a Pelletier, a Freycinet, a Coriolis and I avoid naming any of those living, for fear of paining their podesty. I may at least be allowed to say that I loved to recognize all the noble generosity of the Christian Faith in my illustrious friends the creator of Crystallography (Haüy), the introducers of quinine and stethoscope (Pelletier and Laënnec), the famous voyager on board of the 'Urania', and the immortal founders of the theory of Dynamic Electricity”

Augustin Louis Cauchy (1789–1857) French mathematician (1789–1857)

Frencinet and Ampère

Love , Pain , Fear , Faith

“Two Years He Walks The Earth. No Phone, No Pool, No Pets, No Cigarettes. Ultimate Freedom. An Extremist. An Aesthetic Voyager Whose Home Is The Road. Escaped From Atlanta. Thou Shalt Not Return, Cause "The West Is The Best." And Now After Two Rambling Years Comes The Final And Greatest Adventure. The Climactic Battle To Kill The False Being Within And Victoriously Conclude The Spiritual Revolution! Ten Days + Nights Of Freight Trains And Hitchhiking Bring Him To The Great White North. No Longer To Be Poisoned By Civilization He Flees, And Walks Alone Upon The Land To Become Lost In The Wild [double underline under "Wild"]. Alexander Supertramp May 1992.”

Christopher McCandless (1968–1992) American hiker and explorer

Carved into a sheet of plywood inside the "Magic Bus", May 2, 1992

Home , Freedom , Victory , Falseness

“My father taught me that the sea is full of signs. Let's say we leave on a voyage at sunset. At midnight the navigator listens for chirping birds. You and I don't hear them—we can't hear them. Only the navigator can hear them.”

Mau Piailug (1932–2010) Micronesian navigator from the Carolinian island of Satawal and a teacher of traditional, non-instrument wa…

The Last Navigator (1987)

Bird , Sea

“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.”

Marcel Proust book In Search of Lost Time

Le seul véritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence, ce ne serait pas d'aller vers de nouveaux paysages, mais d'avoir d'autres yeux, de voir l'univers avec les yeux d'un autre, de cent autres, de voir les cent univers que chacun d'eux voit, que chacun d'eux est.
Source: In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol. V: The Captive (1923), Ch. II: "The Verdurins Quarrel with M. de Charlus"

Youth , Universe

“When in 1909 our battlefleet returned from its voyage around the world, Admirals Wainwright and Schroeder represented the best traditions and the most effective action in our navy; one was of old American blood and of English descent; the other was the son of German immigrants. But one was not a native-American and the other a German-American. Each was an American pure and simple. Each bore allegiance only to the flag of the United States. Each would have been incapable of considering the interests of Germany or of England or of any other country except the United States.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)

World , Country

“Of this voyage, I observe," says the Admiral, "that it has miraculously been shown, as may be understood by this writing, by the many signal miracles that He has shown on the voyage, and for me, who for so great a time was in the court of Your Highnesses with the opposition and against the opinion of so many high personages of your household, who were all against me, alleging this undertaking to be folly, which I hope in Our Lord will be to the greater glory of Christianity, which to some slight extent already has happened.”

Cristoforo Colombo (1451–1506) Explorer, navigator, and colonizer

15 March 1493
Journal of the First Voyage

Hope , Time

“In spite of the opinions of certain narrow-minded people, who would shut up the human race upon this globe, as within some magic circle which it must never outstep, we shall one day travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars, with the same facility, rapidity, and certainty as we now make the voyage from Liverpool to New York!”

Jules Verne book From the Earth to the Moon

À en croire certains esprits bornés, — c'est le qualificatif qui leur convient, — l'humanité serait renfermée dans un cercle de Popilius qu'elle ne saurait franchir, et condamnée à végéter sur ce globe sans jamais pouvoir s'élancer dans les espaces planétaires! Il n'en est rien! On va aller à la Lune, on ira aux planètes, on ira aux étoiles, comme on va aujourd'hui de Liverpool à New York, facilement, rapidement, sûrement, et l'océan atmosphérique sera bientôt traversé comme les océans de la Lune!
Tr. Walter James Miller (1978)
Variant: If we are to believe certain narrow minded people — and what else can we call them? — humanity is confined within a circle of Popilius from which there is no escape, condemned to vegetate upon this globe, never able to venture into interplanetary space! That's not so! We are going to the moon, we shall go to the planets, we shall travel to the stars just as today we go from Liverpool to New York, easily, rapidly, surely, and the oceans of space will be crossed like the seas of the moon.
Source: From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Ch. XIX: A Monster Meeting (Charles Scribner's Sons "Uniform Edition", 1890, p. 93)

People , Travel , Star

“You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.”

Kurt Vonnegut book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

"Eliot Rosewater" to a group of science fiction writers
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)
Context: I love you sons of bitches. You’re all I read any more. You're the only ones who’ll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.

Hell , Time

“Doing what is for the good of the people, this must be the truest criterion of right government, in accordance with which the wise and good man will govern the affairs of his subjects. Just as the captain of a ship keeps watch for what is at any moment for the good of the vessel and the sailors, not by writing rules, but by making his science his law, and thus preserves his fellow voyagers, so may not a right government be established in the same way by men who could rule by this principle, making science more powerful than the laws? And whatever the wise rulers do, they can commit no error, so long as they maintain one great principle and by always dispensing absolute justice to them with wisdom and science are able to preserve the citizens and make them better than they were, so far as that is possible.”

Plato book Statesman

296d-297b
Statesman

Wisdom , Men , People , Way

“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 282
Context: Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.

Wisdom , Books , Time

“The ragamuffin who sees his life as a voyage of discovery and runs the risk of failure has a better feel for faithfulness than the timid man who hides behind the law and never finds out who he is at all.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out

Life , Faith , Law , Feeling

“It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

Source: Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

Sadness , Travel

“The untold want, by life and land ne'er granted,
Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.”

Walt Whitman book Fulles d'herba

Variant: Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.
Source: Leaves of Grass

Life

“We are made of stellar ash. Our origin and evolution have been tied to distant cosmic events. The exploration of the cosmos is a voyage of self-discovery.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos

Distant

“It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.”

Robert Silverberg Dying Inside

Source: Dying Inside

World , Color , Time

“set sail on a voyage of your own titanic facts”

Mary Pope Osborne (1949) American children's writer

“I loathe a friend whose gratitude grows old, a friend who takes his friend's prosperity but will not voyage with him in his grief”

Euripidés (-480–-406 BC) ancient Athenian playwright

Gratitude

“It's hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002)

Reality , Heart , Sea

“Life’s a voyage that’s homeward bound.”

Herman Melville book White-Jacket

Variant: Whoever afflict us, whatever surround, Life is a voyage that's homeward-bound!
Source: White-Jacket (1850), Ch. 93
Context: The worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves; our officers cannot remove them, even if they would. From the last ills no being can save another; therein each man must be his own saviour. For the rest, whatever befall us, let us never train our murderous guns inboard; let us not mutiny with bloody pikes in our hands. Our Lord High Admiral will yet interpose; and though long ages should elapse, and leave our wrongs unredressed, yet, shipmates and world-mates! let us never forget, that, Whoever afflict us, whatever surround, Life is a voyage that's homeward-bound!

Life

“But the true voyagers are only those who leave
Just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons,
They never turn aside from their fatality
And without knowing why they always say: "Let's go!”

Charles Baudelaire book Les Fleurs du mal

Source: Les Fleurs du Mal

Light , Heart

“I am no more messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)
Context: 11. The Master answered and said "Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river.12. "The current of the river swept silently over them all — young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going it's own way, knowing only its own crystal self.13. "Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth.14. "But one creature said at last, 'I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.'15. "The other creatures laughed and said, 'Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed against the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!'16. "But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.17. "Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.18. "And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried 'See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah come to save us all!'19. "And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure."20. "But they cried the more, 'Savior!' all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone, and they were left alone making legends of a Savior."

“We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Peaceful , World

“I wanted to create a voyage to the moon just for her, but what I
should have given her was a real journey on earth.”

Mathias Malzieu book La Mécanique du cœur

Source: La Mécanique du cœur

“Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Love , People

“As surely as there is a voyage away, there is a journey home.”

Jack Kornfield (1945) American writer

Source: After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

Home

“Art hurts. Art urges voyages—
and it is easier to stay at home.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer

"The Chicago Picasso" (1968)

Art , Home , Hurt

“I am the son of the road, my country is a caravan and my life is the most unexpected of voyages. i belong to earth and to the god and it is to them that I will one day soon return”

Amin Maalouf (1949) Francophone Lebanese writer based in France

Life , God , Country

“Voyages are accomplished inwardly.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

Travel

“Now I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.”

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) English philosopher, born 1588

Last words

“…I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt.”

Jeanette Winterson book Sexing the Cherry

Source: Sexing the Cherry

Courage , Sea

“Here the men lost all patience, and complained of the length of the voyage, but the Admiral encouraged them in the best manner he could, representing the profits they were about to acquire, and adding that it was to no purpose to complain, having come so far, they had nothing to do but continue on to the Indies, till with the help of our Lord, they should arrive there.”

Cristoforo Colombo (1451–1506) Explorer, navigator, and colonizer

10 October 1492
Variant translation: Here the people could stand it no longer and complained of the long voyage; but the Admiral cheered them as best he could, holding out good hope of the advantages they would have. He added that it was useless to complain, he had come [to go] to the Indies, and so had to continue it until he found them, with the help of Our Lord.
As translated in Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1963) by Samuel Eliot Morison, p. 62
Journal of the First Voyage

Men , Help , Patience

“The voyage appeared short, for I had nothing to anticipate.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Other Gift Books

Appearance

“With quaint manners and quaint names these men had the hero's heart and the confessor's faith. Their faith was, indeed, their strength. Strong in the supremacy of conscience, in that real earnestness which springs from conviction, and which prompts to enterprise; far-sighted in political sagacity, because seeing Him that is invisible; shrewd enough to know that the truest policy for the life that now is, is a reverent recognition of the life that is to come, they were brave in endurance and patient under trial; and never losing sight of the principle for which they struggled, and of the purpose of their voyage afar, they "won the wilderness for God."”

William Morley Punshon (1824–1881) English Nonconformist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 313.

Life , Men , God , Faith

“The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy, the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage.”

John Galsworthy (1867–1933) English novelist and playwright

Source: Over the River (1933), Ch. 1

Housing

“The oft-heard comment that Leonardo [da Vinci]'s genius managed to transcend the culture of his time is amply justified. But his was not a science-fiction voyage into the future as much as a plunge into the past.”

Lucio Russo (1944) Italian historian and scientist

11.2, "The Renaissance", p. 336
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn (2004)

Science , Time , Past , Future

“The soul which stops at creatures delays the course of the voyage by which it moves toward God; and by desiring to enjoy them, it proportionately deprives itself of the enjoyment of God.”

Pierre Nicole (1625–1695) French Jansenists

Essais de Morale (1753), XII, 301, in The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927) as translated by Mary Ilford (1968), p. 118

God , Soul

“No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency they must know something of the laws of navigation.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) Suffragist and Women's Rights activist

Solitude of Self (1892)

Life , Women , Men , Law

“Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

Home , Science , Waiting

“We are all inclined to accept conventional forms or colours as the only correct ones. Children sometimes think that stars must be star-shaped, though naturally they are not. The people who insist that in a picture the sky must be blue, and the grass green, are not very different from these children. They get indignant if they see other colours in a picture, but if we try to forget all we have heard about green grass and blue skies, and look at the world as if we had just arrived from another planet on a voyage of discovery and were seeing it for the first time, we may find that things are apt to have the most surprising colours.”

Ernst Gombrich book The Story of Art

Source: The Story of Art (1978), p. 26.

Children , People , World , Star

“Imagine we could accelerate continuously at 1 g — what we're comfortable with on good old terra firma — to the midpoint of our voyage, and decelerate continuously at 1 g until we arrive at our destination. It would take a day to get to Mars, a week and a half to Pluto, a year to the Oort Cloud, and a few years to the nearest stars.”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 395

Imagination , Star

“One wishes to go on. On this great river one could glide forever — and here we discover the definition of bliss, salvation, Heaven, all the old Mediterranean dreams: a journey from wonder to wonder, drifting through eternity into ever-deeper, always changing grandeur, through beauty continually surpassing itself: the ultimate Homeric voyage.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

On the Colorado River, in “Down the River with Major Powell”, p. 201
The Journey Home (1977)

Beauty , Dreams , Change

“Ralegh's own circle, which turned Christopher Marlowe into a rationalist, was dominated by… Thomas Hariot. For navigation is dependent on astronomy; it went hand in hand with the new speculations about the world and the solar system… in turn, the voyages of the great navigators inspired the literature of Elizabethan England. The worlds of art and science and the physical world unfolded then together. It was not by accident that the first table of logarithms was published within a few years of the First Folio.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"Sense and Sensibility"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)

World , Art , Literature , Science

“No friend to Love like a long voyage at sea.”

Aphra Behn The Rover

The Rover, Part I, Act I, sc. ii (1677).

Love , Sea

“The stars are silent.
Voyager among dark harbors, I listen, but the midnight wind carries only the sound of trees and water lapping against the gunwale and the solitary cry of the night swallow.
There is no dawn. No searing sun rises in east or west. The rocks over Calumal do not silver, and the great round world slides through the void.”

Jack McDevitt book The Hercules Text

Source: The Hercules Text (1986), Chapter 10 Monitor (p. 162)

World , Star , Tree , Water

“The Portuguese had undertaken their voyages towards the southern hemisphere in spite of the science of their day… they followed an irresistible urge, which went against their scientific and religious convictions.”

Reijer Hooykaas (1906–1994) Dutch historian

"The Portuguese Discoveries and the Rise of Modern Science," 1983

Science

“This was the beginning of something, yet I had ventured back into a world from which I had come and found it an alien world of which I was no longer a part. In a sense I had always been alien. My Druidic training had taken me deep into a past that held more than the present, and along with it had been my father’s accounts, returning home after voyages, of a world beyond our shores. I had mingled with the men of his crews, almost half of which had come from other lands, other cultures, until I had become a stranger in my own land.”

Louis L'Amour book The Walking Drum

Source: The Walking Drum (1984), Ch. 31

Men , World , Home , Sense

“What need is there of long journeying on the land or voyaging on the seas to seek and search for virtue, whose roots have been set by their Maker ever so near us, as the wise legislator of the Jews also says, “in thy mouth, in thy heart and in thy hand,” thereby indicating in a figure, words, thoughts and actions? All these, indeed, need the cultivator’s skill. Those who prefer idleness to labor, not only prevent the growths but also wither and destroy the roots. But those who consider inaction mischievous and are willing to labor, do as the husbandman does with fine young shoots. By constant care they rear the virtues into stems rising up to heaven, saplings ever blooming and immortal, bearing and never ceasing to bear the fruits of happiness, or as some hold, not so much bearing as being in themselves that happiness. These Moses often calls by the compound name of wholefruits. In the case of growths which spring from the earth, neither are the trees the fruit nor the fruit the trees, but in the soul’s plantation the saplings of wisdom, of justice, of temperance, have their whole being transformed completely into fruits.”

Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher

68-71.
Every Good Man is Free

Wisdom , Justice , Soul , Search

“We go on this voyage to find happiness.
You see? A smile really suits you.”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Voyage
Lyrics, Rainbow

Smile , Happiness

“And Spaceship Earth, that glorious and bloody circus, continued its four-billion-year-long spiral orbit about the Sun; the engineering, I must admit, was so exquisite that none of the passengers felt any motion at all. Those on the dark side of the ship mostly slept and voyaged into worlds of freedom and fantasy; those on the light side moved about the tasks appointed for them by their rulers, or idled waiting for the next order from above.”

Robert Anton Wilson book The Illuminatus! Trilogy

The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975)

World , Freedom , Light , Waiting

“He had thought the army would pay for the voyage, but the army had refused, saying that Sharpe was accepting an invitation to join the 95th Rifles and if the 95th Rifles refused to pay his passage then damn them, damn their badly colored coats, and damn Sharpe. […] Britain had sent Sharpe to India, and Britain, Sharpe reckoned, should fetch him back.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Lieutenant Richard Sharpe, p. 11
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Trafalgar (2000)

Color

“Frank O'Connor, the Irish writer, tells in one of his books how, as a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside, and when they came to an orchard wall that seemed too high and too doubtful to try and too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their hats and tossed them over the wall — and then they had no choice but to follow them.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, President John F. Kennedy's last formal speech and public words

Books , Way , Boy

“Our earthly possessions will indeed perish in the final wreck of all things; but let the ship perish, let all we have sink in the deep, if we may come "safe to land." From these storms and billows — these dangerous seas — these tempestuous voyages — may we all be brought at last, safe to heaven.”

Albert Barnes (1798–1870) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 206.

Sea

“Knowledge and wonder are the dyad of our worthy lives as intellectual beings. Voyager did wonders for our knowledge, but performed just as mightily in the service of wonder—and the two elements are complementary, not independent or opposed. The thought fills me with awe—a mechanical contraption that could fit in the back of a pickup truck, traveling through space for twelve years, dodging around four giant bodies and their associated moons, and finally sending exquisite photos across more than four light-hours of space from the farthest planet in our solar system.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"The Horn of Triton", pp. 508–509
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

Travel , Photo , Knowledge , Light

“We have surmounted all the perils and endured all the agonies of the past. We shall provide against and thus prevail over the dangers and problems of the future, withhold no sacrifice, grudge no toil, seek no sordid gain, fear no foe. All will be well. We have, I believe, within us the life-strength and guiding light by which the tormented world around us may find the harbour of safety, after a storm-beaten voyage.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

At Chateau Laurier, Ottawa, Canada, November 9, 1954 ; as cited at The Churchill Centre http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/speeches/quotations/famous-quotations-and-stories.
Post-war years (1945–1955)

Life , World , Fear , Problem

“Inner experience, unable to have principles either in dogma (a moral attitude), or in science (knowledge can be neither its goal nor its origin), or in a search of enriching states (an experimental, aesthetic attitude), it cannot have any other concern nor other goal than itself. Opening myself to inner experience, I have placed in it all value and authority. Henceforth I can have no other value, no other authority (in the realm of mind). Value and authority imply the discipline of a method, the existence of a community.
I call experience a voyage to the end of the possible of man. Anyone may choose not to embark on this voyage, but if he does embark on it, this supposes the negation of the authorities, the existing values which limit the possible. By virtue of the fact that it is negation of other values, other authorities, experience, having a positive existence, becomes itself positively value and authority.
Inner experience has always had objectives other than itself in which one invested value and authority. … If God, knowledge, and suppression of pain were to cease to be in my eyes convincing objectives, … would inner experience from that moment seem empty to me, henceforth impossible without justification? …
I received the answer [from Blanchot]: experience itself is authority.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. 7

God , Pain , Search , Communication

“[W]omen under phallocratic rule are confined to the role of vessels/carriers, directed and controlled by men. Since that role is the basic base reversal of the very be-ing of Voyaging/Spiraling women, when we direct our own Crafts/Vessels we become reversers of that deadly reversal.”

Mary Daly (1928–2010) American radical feminist philosopher and theologian

Source: Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978–1990), p. xxvi (New Intergalactic Introduction).

Women , Men

“The two-party system has given this country the war of Lyndon Johnson, the Watergate of Nixon, and the incompetence of Carter. Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life-rafts.”

Eugene McCarthy (1916–2005) American politician

Chicago Tribune (10 September 1978)

Life , War , People , Success

“Is not because I am a poor sailor and fear the voyage to Skye.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig Lecture (December 19, 2007)

Fear

“Everything has altered its dimensions, except the world we live in. The more we know of that, the smaller it seems. Time and distance have been abridged, remote countries have become accessible, and the antipodes are upon visiting terms. There is a reunion of the human race; and the family resemblance now that we begin to think alike, dress alike, and live alike, is very striking. The South Sea Islanders, and the inhabitants of China, import their fashions from Paris, and their fabrics from Manchester, while Rome and London supply missionaries to the ‘ends of the earth,’ to bring its inhabitants into ‘one fold, under one Shepherd.’ Who shall write a book of travels now? Livingstone has exhausted the subject. What field is there left for a future Munchausen? The far West and the far East have shaken hands and pirouetted together, and it is a matter of indifference whether you go to the moors in Scotland to shoot grouse, to South America to ride and alligator, or to Indian jungles to shoot tigers-there are the same facilities for reaching all, and steam will take you to either with the equal ease and rapidity. We have already talked with New York; and as soon as our speaking-trumpet is mended shall converse again. ‘To waft a sigh from Indus to the pole,’ is no longer a poetic phrase, but a plain matter of fact of daily occurrence. Men breakfast at home, and go fifty miles to their counting-houses, and when their work is done, return to dinner. They don’t go from London to the seaside, by way of change, once a year; but they live on the coast, and go to the city daily. The grand tour of our forefathers consisted in visiting the principle cities of Europe. It was a great effort, occupied a vast deal of time, cost a large sum of money, and was oftener attended with danger than advantage. It comprised what was then called, the world: whoever had performed it was said to have ‘seen the world,’ and all that it contained. The Grand Tour now means a voyage round the globe, and he who has not made it has seen nothing.”

Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796–1865) Canadian-British politician, judge, and author

The Season-Ticket, An Evening at Cork 1860 p. 1-2.

Men , Money , Books , World

“…As time passed I began to play a game with water's secret powers; I surrendered my so-called free consciousness and allowed the water to take possession of it for a while. Little by little this game turned into a profoundly earnest endeavour, because I realised that one could detach one's own consciousness from the body and attach it to that of the water. When my own consciousness was eventually returned to me, then the water's most deeply concealed psyche often revealed the most extraordinary things to me. As a result of this investigation, a researcher was born who could dispatch his consciousness on a voyage of discovery, as it were. In this way I was able to experience things that had escaped other people's notice, because they were unaware that a human being is able to send forth his free consciousness into those places the eyes cannot see. By practising this blindfolded vision, I eventually developed a bond with mysterious Nature, whose essential being I then slowly learnt to perceive and understand…”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Callum Coats: Living Energies - Viktor Schauberger's brilliant work with Natural Energies Explained (2002)

People , Secret , Way , Game

“It is not true, out of geometry, that the mathematical sciences are, in all their parts those models of finished accuracy which many suppose. The extreme boundaries of analysis have always been as imperfectly understood as the tract beyond the boundaries was absolutely unknown. But the way to enlarge the settled country has not been by keeping within it, but by making voyages of discovery, and I am perfectly convinced that the student should be exercised in this manner; that is, that he should be taught how to examine the boundary, as well as how to cultivate the interior. …allowing all students whose capacity will let them read on the higher branches of applied mathematics, to have each his chance of being led to the cultivation of those parts of analysis on which rather depends its future progress than its present use in the sciences of matter.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

The Differential and Integral Calculus (1836)

Way , Exercises , Mathematics , Science

“The tenement – the name derives from a fifteenth-century legal term for a multiple dwelling – always seemed to me a “ship afloat in concrete.” After all didn’t the building carry passengers on a voyage through life? No. 55 sat at the corner of Dropsie avenue near the elevated train, or the elevated as we called it in those days. It was a treasure house of stories that illustrated tenement life as I remembered it, stories that needed to be told before they faded from memory. Within its “railroad flats,” with rooms strung together train-like lived low-paid city employees or laborers and their turbulent families. Most were recent immigrants, intent n their own survival. They kept busy raising children and dreaming of the better lie they knew existed “uptown.” Hallways were filled with a rich stew of cooking aromas, sounds of arguments and the tinny wail from Victrolas. What community spirit there was stemmed from the common hostility of tenants to the landlord or his surrogate superintendent. Typically, the buildings tenants came and went with regularity, depending on the vagaries of their fortunes But many remained for a lifetime, imprisoned by poverty or old age. There was no real privacy or anonymity. Everybody knew about everybody. Human dramas, both good and bad, instantly gathered witness like ants swarming around a piece of dropped food. From window to window or on the stoop below, the tenants analyzed, evaluated and critiqued each happening, following an obligatory admission that it was really none of their business.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

XV-XVI, December 2004
A Contract With God (2004)

Life , Hostility , Children , Lie

“Where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind forever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.”

William Wordsworth book The Prelude

Bk. III, l. 60.
The Prelude (1799-1805)

Sea

“I travel through your waist as through a river,
I voyage your body as through a grove going,
as by a footpath going up a mountain
and suddenly coming upon a steep ravine
I go the straitened way of your keen thoughts
break through to daylight upon your white forehead
and there my spirit flings itself down, is shattered
now I collect my fragments one by one
and go on, bodiless, searching, in the dark…. you take on the likeness of a tree, a cloud,
you are all birds and now you are a star,
now you resemble the sharp edge of a sword
and now the executioner's bowl of blood,
the encroaching ivy that over grows and then
roots out the soul and divides it from itself”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Sun Stone (1957)

Way , Travel , Soul , Search

“I was presented to Monsieur de Montmagny, the viceroy. He asked my nationality, name, and rank. When I had satisfied him by recounting the success of my voyage, which he either believed or pretended to, he kindly lent me a room in his apartment. I was happy to meet a man capable of enlightened opinions, one who was not surprised when I told him that the earth must have turned beneath me while I was aloft. Having begun my ascent two leagues from Paris, I had come down in almost a straight line to Canada.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)

Success , Happiness

“It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“Wisconsin: On a Monument to the Pigeon”, p. 109.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Wisconsin: Marshland Elegy," "Wisconsin: The Sand Counties" "Wisconsin: On a Monument to the Pigeon," and "Wisconsin: Flambeau"

Men , Knowledge , Sense , Time

“Ah, if men were those superior beings that the utopians of authority like to speak to us of, if we could close our eyes to reality, and live, like them, in a world of dreams and illusions as to the superiority of those who think themselves called to power, perhaps we also should do like them; perhaps we also should believe in the virtues of those who govern.
With virtuous masters, what dangers could slavery offer? Do you remember the Slave-owner of whom we heard so often, hardly thirty years ago? Was he not supposed to take paternal care of his slaves? "He alone," we were told, "could hinder these lazy, indolent, improvident children dying of hunger. How could he crush his slaves through hard labor, or mutilate them by blows, when his own interest lay in feeding them well, in taking care of them as much as of his own children! And then, did not 'the law' see to it that the least swerving of a slave-owner from the path of duty was punished?" How many times have we not been told so! But the reality was such that, having returned from a voyage to Brazil, Darwin was haunted all his life by the cries of agony of mutilated slaves, by the sobs of moaning women whose fingers were crushed in thumbscrews!”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (1896)

Life , Women , Men , Hunger

“Look up from your BlackBerry one night. That is the moon. On it are exactly 12 sets of human footprints -- untouched, unchanged, abandoned. For the first time in history, the moon is not just a mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke. A vigorous young president once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage "the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked."”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

And so we did it. We came. We saw. Then we retreated. How could we?
Column, July 17, 2009, "The Moon We Left Behind" http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer071709.php3#.U34lesJOWUk at washingtonpost.com, July 17, 2009.
2000s, 2009

History , Time , Night

“In comparing civilized man with the animal world, one is as the Alpine traveller, who sees the mountains soaring into the sky and can hardly discern where the deep shadowed crags and roseate peaks end, and where the clouds of heaven begin. Surely the awe-struck voyager may be excused if, at first, he refuses to believe the geologist, who tells him that these glorious masses are, after all, the hardened mud of primeval seas, or the cooled slag of subterranean furnaces—of one substance with the dullest clay, but raised by inward forces to that place of proud and seemingly inaccessible glory. But the geologist is right; and due reflection on his teachings, instead of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, adds all the force of intellectual sublimity, to the mere aesthetic intuition of the uninstructed beholder.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 131-132

World , Travel , Mountain , Animals

“Born.
So he was born, too.
Born like everyone else.
Like me, who will die.
The son of an actual woman.
A new arrival from the body's depths.
A voyager to Omega.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"Born"
Poems New and Collected (1998), No End of Fun (1967)

“To be whole is to be part;
true voyage is return.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 3 (p. 84)

Parting

“Oh, her heart’s adrift with one
On an endless voyage gone!
Night and morning
Hannah’s at the window binding shoes.”

Lucy Larcom (1824–1893) American teacher, poet, author

"Hannah Binding Shoes".
Poems (1869)

Shoe , Heart , Night

“Reason, in fact, is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason — nothing which He has not willed should be handled and understood by reason. All, therefore, who are ignorant of God, must necessarily be ignorant also of a thing which is His, because no treasure-house at all is accessible to strangers. And thus, voyaging all the universal course of life without the rudder of reason, they know not how to shun the hurricane which is impending over the world.”
Quippe res dei ratio quia deus omnium conditor nihil non ratione providit disposuit ordinavit, nihil [enim] non ratione tractari intellegique voluit. [3] Igitur ignorantes quique deum rem quoque eius ignorent necesse est quia nullius omnino thesaurus extraneis patet. Itaque universam vitae conversationem sine gubernaculo rationis transfretantes inminentem saeculo procellam evitare non norunt.

Tertullian (155–220) Christian theologian

De Paenitentia (On Repentance), 1.2-3

Life , God , World , Universe

“I set a course just east of Lyra
And northwest of Pegasus
Flew into the light of Deneb
Sailed across the Milky Way
On my ship, the 'Rocinante'
Wheeling through the galaxies
Headed for the heart of Cygnus
Headlong into mystery
-- Cygnus X-1, Book One; The Voyage (1977)”

Neil Peart (1952–2020) Canadian-American drummer , lyricist, and author

Rush Lyrics

Books , Way , Light , Heart

“Let me end with… man's ageless fantasy, to fly to the moon…. Plutarch and Lucian, Ariosto and Ben Jonson wrote about it, before the days of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and science fiction. The seventeenth century was heady with… fables about voyages to the moon. Kepler wrote one full of deep scientific ideas… wrote… The Discovery of a New World. They did not draw a line between science and fancy… they all tried to guess where… earth's gravity would stop. Only Kepler understood that gravity has no boundary, and put a law to it—… the wrong law.
All this was a few years before Isaac Newton was born, and it was all in his head that day in 1666, when he… came to conceive… that the moon is like a ball… thrown so hard that it falls exactly as fast as the horizon… he went on to calculate how long… the distant moon would take to round the earth… [T]he imagination that day chimed with nature, and made a harmony.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

World , Law , Imagination , Idea

“I know Bono and he knows Ono, she knows Eno whose phone goes thus:
"Brian's not home, he's at the North Pole, but if you'd like to leave a weird noise…"
Eno Collaboration, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Road”

Nigel Blackwell

1997
Lyrics

Home

“Life is a voyage. The winds of life come strong
From every point; yet each will speed thy course along,
If thou with steady hand when tempests blow
Canst keep thy course aright and never once let go.”

Theodore Chickering Williams (1855–1915) American hymnwriter

The Voyage of Life, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Life , Strong , Speed

“The expansion of Europe was a phenomenon of such magnitude with such a profound and irreversible effect on humankind that it might be thought that our moralising tendency would be silenced in the face of it. But as we saw on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage in 1992, there are those who think that its disastrous consequences for indigenous people make it quite definitely a bad thing which should not have happened. Unprovoked invasion of the territory of another society is immoral by our standards and breaches current international law, but if these be the standards we apply to history there will be no end to our condemning.”

John Hirst (1942–2016) Australian historian

Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (2005)

People , Law , History , Thinking

“It had been the winter of 1835-6 that the ship, Alert, in her voyage for hides on the remote and almost unknown coast of California, floated into the vast solitude of the bay of San Francisco. All around was the stillness of nature. One vessel, a Russian, lay at anchor there, but during our whole stay not a sail came or went. Our trade was with remote missions, which sent hides to us in launches manned by their Indians… Over a region far beyond our sight there was no other human habitations, expect that an enterprising Yankee, years in advance of his time, had put up, on the rising ground above the landing, a shanty of rough boards, where he carried on a very small retail trade between the hide ships and the Indians. On the evening of Saturday, the thirteenth of August, 1859 (I again sailed into) the entrance to San Francisco, (now) the great center of worldwide commerce.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815–1882) United States author and lawyer

Twenty-Four Years After (1869)

Nature , Solitude , Winter , Time

“Tuesday, January 13, 1835: We made the land at Point Conception... the point of Santa Barbara, to which we were bound, lying about fifty miles to the southeast of this point, we continued sailing down the coast during the day and the following night, and on the next morning.

On the whole coast of California there was not a lighthouse, a beacon, or a buoy, and the charts were made up from old and disconnected surveys by British, Russian, and Mexican voyagers. Birds of prey and passage swooped and dived about us, wild beasts ranged through the oak groves... herds of deer came to the water's edge.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. book Two Years Before the Mast

Two Years Before the Mast (1840)

Lying , Bird , Water , Night

“Is that the minds last, soundless, dying cry? Who will remember? There is no rustling of old crowds as my long, wrenching, joyous voyage ended, only the question, "Who will remember?"”

Roger Kahn (1927–2020) American baseball writer

Afterwords on the Life of Kings, p. 438
The Boys Of Summer

Question , Cry

“Fitz-Roy's temper was a most unfortunate one. It was usually worst in the early morning, and with his eagle eye he could generally detect something amiss about the ship, and was then unsparing in his blame. He was very kind to me, but was a man very difficult to live with on the intimate terms which necessarily followed from our messing by ourselves in the same cabin. We had several quarrels; for instance, early in the voyage at Bahia, in Brazil, he defended and praised slavery, which I abominated, and told me that he had just visited a great slave-owner, who had called up many of his slaves and asked them whether they were happy, and whether they wished to be free, and all answered "No." I then asked him, perhaps with a sneer, whether he thought that the answer of slaves in the presence of their master was worth anything? This made him excessively angry, and he said that as I doubted his word we could not live any longer together. I thought that I should have been compelled to leave the ship; but as soon as the news spread, which it did quickly, as the captain sent for the first lieutenant to assuage his anger by abusing me, I was deeply gratified by receiving an invitation from all the gun-room officers to mess with them. But after a few hours Fitz-Roy showed his usual magnanimity by sending an officer to me with an apology and a request that I would continue to live with him.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

volume I, chapter II: "Autobiography", pages 60-61 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=78&itemID=F1452.1&viewtype=image
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)

Anger , Happiness

“Had there not been a natural goodness and indestructible force in my father, I see not how be could have bodied himself forth from these mean impediments. I suppose good precepts were not wanting. There was the Bible to read. Old John Orr, the schoolmaster, used from time to time to lodge with them; be was religious and enthusiastic (though in practice irregular with drink). In my grandfather, also, there seems to have been a certain geniality; for instance, he and a neighbor, Thomas Hogg, read "Anson's Voyages;" also tho "Arabian Nights," for which latter my father, armed with zealous conviction, scrupled not to censure them openly. By one means and another, at an early age he had acquired principles, lights that not only flickered, but shone steadily to guide his way.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

Age , Way , Drink , Nature

“A novelist has to enter deeper exile still. In most outward ways the experience was depressive, as many young would-be writers and painters who have ever gone to Greece have discovered. We used to have a nickname for the sense of inadequacy and accidie it produced – the ‘Aegean blues’. One has to be a very complete artist to create good work among the purest and most balanced landscapes on the planet…The Greece of the Islands is Circe still; no place for the artist-voyager to linger long, if he cares for his soul.”

John Fowles book The Magus

Introduction (1977 edition)
The Magus (1965)

Way , Soul , Sense