Voyage of Discovery Quotes

It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.

The spirit of Columbus hovers over us to-day.

What everyone in the astronaut corps shares in common is not gender or ethnic background, but motivation, perseverance, and desire - the desire to participate in a voyage of discovery.

Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at sea, like John Cabot. Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourge the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging.

Columbus found a world, and had no chart save one that Faith deciphered in the skies.

What drives me is exploration with a purpose, more the classic Royal Geographical Society genre.

In reality, we are all travelers - even explorers of mortality.

I keep sailing on in this middle passage. I am sailing into the wind and the dark. But I am doing my best to keep my boat steady and my sails full.

Was the crew well? Was I not? I had profited in many ways by the voyage. I had even gained flesh, and actually weighed a pound more than when I sailed from Boston.

The days pass happily with me wherever my ship sails.

Not write what you know, but know what you write. If you write about a world before, after, or other than this one, enter that world completely. Search it to find your deepest longings and most terrible fears. Let imagination carry you as far as it may, as long as you recount the voyage with excitement and wonder. But this is the most important rule: write the book you most long to read.

And so by the fifteenth century, on October 8, the Europeans were looking for a new place to try to get to, and they came up with a new concept: the West.

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become the path himself.

He [Columbus] enjoyed long stretches of pure delight such as only a seaman may know, and moments of high, proud exultation that only a discoverer can experience.

Young sailors once stood under a square sail, gazing wonderingly across the water to where a strange shore rose about the sea - a New World.

Columbus did not seek a new route to the Indies in response to a majority directive.

The greatest journeys all start with a single step.

If the Spray discovered no continents on her voyage, it may be that there were no more continents to be discovered. She did not seek new worlds, or sail to pow-wow about the dangers of the sea.

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon.

The American who first discovered Columbus made a bad discovery.

As for the rest of the distance around the inhabited earth which has not been visited by us up to the present time (because of the fact that the navigators who sailed in opposite directions never met), it is not of very great extent, if we reckon from the parallel distances that have been traversed by us... For those who undertook circumnavigation, and turned back without having achieved their purpose, say that they were made to turn back, not because of any continent that stood in their way and hindered their further advance, inasmuch as the sea still continued open as before, but because of their destitution and loneliness.

For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.

It was for Columbus, when the right hour struck, forced and propelled by this fresh life, to reveal the land where these new principles were to be brought, and where the awaited trial of the new civilization was to be made.

O Mariner-soul, Thy quest is but begun, There are new worlds Forever to be won.

A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.