John Wesley Powell Quotes

Golf without bunkers and hazards would be tame and monotonous. So would life.

And for me, the real world involves everything: risk, danger, beauty, energy, all we meet with in the real world.

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

If I wasn't doing this kind of exploration, I'd like to be doing some other kind of exploration. It might be more risky, or less risky, but, in the business of exploration, risk is part of the territory.

I think it's better that life is kind of like a mystery, I think that's what drives us.

Everything that we start is something that we don't know what the outcome is going to be.

When you go into a forest, anything can happen.

There's so much to explore! And personally, I don't know. It's such a crapshoot.

There is no way of truly knowing where a road will lead until it is walked.

Much of the excitement we get out of our work is that we don't really know what we are doing.

The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades.

Like all explorers, we are drawn to discover what's out there without knowing yet if we have the courage to face it.

If you know where it's going, it's not worth doing.

Discovery requires courage and acceptance that we are not in control, and that the future is uncertain.

The creative process is also the most terrifying part because you don't know exactly what's going to happen or where it is going to lead. You don't know what new dangers and challenges you'll find. It takes an enormous amount of internal security to begin with the spirit of adventure, discovery, and creativity. Without doubt, you have to leave the comfort zone of base camp and confront an entirely new and unknown wilderness.

You never know with these things when you're trying something new what can happen. This is all experimental.

Any creative process is about being in a territory which isn't secure, isn't necessarily familiar, and isn't convenient in any sort of way. And that's the excitement of it.

I love the unknown. I love the discovery of what will be happening and just kind of sitting back and not knowing.

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.

'Gonzo' means taking an unknown thing to an unknown place for a known purpose. But sometimes we're lost in an unknown place for no known purpose.

Life is an adventure, it's not a package tour.

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.

I like the unknown. I like mystery.

This life is like a swimming pool. You dive into the water, but you can't see how deep it is.

I was always interested in the possibility maybe of finding my way into a big adventure.