Plutarch Quotes

Anaximander the Milesian, a disciple of Thales, first dared to draw the inhabited world on a tablet; after him Hecataeus the Milesian, a much-travelled man, made the map more accurate, so that it became a source of wonder.

If geography is prose, maps are iconography.

Cartography and geographic thinking are cool.

As Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion; so History without Geography wandreth as a Vagrant without a certaine habitation.

I propose to construct a new chart for navigating, on which I shall delineate all the sea and lands of the Ocean in their proper positions under their bearings; and further, I propose to prepare a book, and to put down all as it were in a picture, by latitude from the equator, and western longitude.

I wanted to be a topographer when I was young.

The earliest maps were 'story' maps. Cartographers were artists who mingled knowledge with supposition, memory and fears. Their maps described both landscape and the events, which had taken place within it, enabling travellers to plot a route as well as to experience a story.

Ten geographers who think the world is flat will tend to reinforce each other's errors ... Only a sailor can set them straight.

In our changing world nothing changes more than geography.

I've always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you've been, where you are, and where you're going -- in a sense it's three tenses in one.

GEOGRAPHER, n. A chap who can tell you offhand the difference between the outside of the world and the inside.

I have always preferred maps to books. They don't answer you back.

The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. They cannot find for us the way again.

Your map of Africa is really quite nice. But my map of Africa lies in Europe. Here is Russia, and here... is France, and we're in the middle - that's my map of Africa.

Eratosthenes, the mapmaker who was the first man to accurately measure the size of the Earth, was a librarian.

The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory.

The world of maps is nice and flat and simple. It has areas for people and areas for monsters. What a shock it is to discover the world is round and the areas merge and nothing separates the monsters and ourselves; that we are all whirling around in space together and there isn't even a graceful way of falling off.

Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.

When your laboratory explodes, lacing your body with a supercharged elixir, what do you do? You don't just lie there. You crawl out of the rubble, hideously scarred, and swear vengeance on the world. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.

Switzerland would me a mighty big place if it were ironed flat.

What is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons?

If you are lying in a tent in the Congo jungle, you don't want to be reading about rainforest biology. You want to be in a distant world.

What did you do, memorize a map of the city for fun?” says Christina. “Yes,” says Will, looking puzzled. “Didn’t you?

I read recently that I was born in Arizona. I wasn't born in Arizona. I was born in New Mexico, but I can understand why people might confuse those two Southwestern desert states.

Something therefore always remains and sticks from the most imprudent of lies, a fact which all bodies and individuals concerned in the art of lying in this world know only too well, and therefore they stop at nothing to achieve this end.