Quotes about Expat and living abroad
“There is a fundamental reason why we look at the sky with wonder and longing—for the same reason that we stand, hour after hour, gazing at the distant swell of the open ocean. There is something like an ancient wisdom, encoded and tucked away in our DNA, that knows its point of origin as surely as a salmonid knows its creek. Intellectually, we may not want to return there, but the genes know, and long for their origins—their home in the salty depths. But if the seas are our immediate source, the penultimate source is certainly the heavens… The spectacular truth is—and this is something that your DNA has known all along—the very atoms of your body—the iron, calcium, phosphorus, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and on and on—were initially forged in long-dead stars. This is why, when you stand outside under a moonless, country sky, you feel some ineffable tugging at your innards. We are star stuff. Keep looking up.”
— Jerry Waxman, professor of astronomy and environmental science
“We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.”
—Richard Feynman
“I confess that I shall expound many things differently from my predecessors, although I shall do so thanks to them, and with their aid, for it was they who first opened the road of inquiry into these very questions.”
— Nicolaus Copernicus, Polish astronomer, the first person to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe (1473-1543), in introduction to Book, ‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’, 1543 cited in Dava Sobel, Copernicus: the man who changed the world, FT.com, September 2, 2011
The poet John Keats once wrote, “Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.”
“Everything you can imagine is real” is a wonderful quote from Pablo Picasso.
“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
—Muriel Rukeyser
“Every traveler has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering.”
-Charles Dickens
“Travel. It leaves you speechless, then turns you into storyteller.”
– Ibn Battuta
“Not all those who wander are lost.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien
“The road must eventually lead to the whole world.”
— Jack Kerouac, American novelist and poet (1922-1969)
“Don't let a yearning for the past get in the way of experiencing the present”
— Claude Levi-Strauss, French anthropologist and ethnologist (1908-2009),
“Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind. Now that we know this, throw the raft away.”
- The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, Jack Kerouac
“What makes expat life so addictive is that every boring or mundane activity you experience at home (like grocery shopping, commuting to work or picking up the dry cleaning) is, when you move to a foreign country, suddenly transformed into an exciting adventure. Try finding peanut butter in a Japanese grocery story or explaining in broken Spanish to the Guatemalan pharmacy that you need cough drops and you’ll understand. When abroad, boredom, routine and ‘normal’ cease to exist. And all that’s left is the thrill and challenge of uncertainty.”
— Reannon Muth
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