Exploratory Quotes & Sayings

If a baby really has no awareness of himself and is totally thing-directed and at the same time all his states of mind are projected onto things, our second paradox makes sense: on the one hand, thought in babies can be viewed as pure accommodation or exploratory movements, but on the other this very same thought is only one, long, completely autistic waking dream. — Jean Piaget

Congress came to see NASA primarily as a jobs program, not an exploratory agency. — Gregory Benford

My biggest fear is expending the best and most exciting energy in sketches, no matter how quickly executed. I often need to empty the rubbish bin several times before regaining the fresh quality of the initial exploratory sketches. — Catherine Stock

Even before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton threw their exploratory committees into the ring, every reporter seemed to be asking, 'Which candidate are Americans more ready for: a white woman or a black man?' — Gloria Steinem

For years, I had no time for exploratory travel. — Renee Fleming

He turned left, therefore, in the hope of finding better fortune in that direction, but after a while lost his nerve and turned a speculative right, and then chanced another exploratory left, and after a few more such maneuvers was thoroughly lost. — Douglas Adams

Creative, exploratory learning requires peers currently puzzled about the same terms or problems. Large universities make the futile attempt to match them by multiplying their courses, and they generally fail since they are bound to curriculum, course structure, and bureaucratic administration. In schools, including universities, most resources are spent to purchase the time and motivation of a limited number of people to take up predetermined problems in a ritually defined setting. The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern. — Ivan Illich

Your post-college years should be an exploratory time in your professional life. From your early twenties and on into your early thirties, you should feel free to explore your professional prospects. Keep an open mind, and don't expect to get everything right straight out of the gate. Be prepared to start over once or twice. — Ivanka Trump

I'm only interested in science fiction that's used as a literary device, a shortcut into something more exploratory or universal about our experience. That's why I think it was invented and why mythology was invented; it's a tool, not an end to itself. — Shane Carruth

Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less. He may learn that what he thought was true was not true. By the elimination of a false premise, his basic capital wealth which in his given lifetime is disembarrassed of further preoccupation with considerations of how to employ a worthless time-consuming hypothesis. Freeing his time for its more effective exploratory investment is to give man increased wealth. — R. Buckminster Fuller

We all operate in two contrasting modes, which might be called open and closed. The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic, more playful and more humorous. The closed mode is the tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned. Most people, unfortunately spend most of their time in the closed mode. — John Cleese

The physical exercise and emotional stretching that children enjoy in unorganized play is more varied and less time-bound than is found in organized sports. Playtime - especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play - is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development. — Richard Louv

Childhood is an exploratory period of calculated investigation. The nagging feeling that a child's life has not really began until he or she attains adulthood makes growing up both a whimsical and fretful time. Childhood is not all merriment since a child realizes that seamless youthful days are an experiment for adulthood. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The variety of minds served the economy of nature in many ways. The Creator, who designed the human brain for activity, had insured the restlessness of all minds by enabling no single one to envisage all the qualities of the creation. Since no one by himself could aspire to a serene knowledge of the whole truth, all men had been drawn into an active, exploratory and cooperative attitude. — Daniel J. Boorstin

LSD is simply an exploratory instrument like a microscope or telescope, except this one is inside of you instead of outside of you. — Alan Watts

Both the writing and the visuals in that sense are very exploratory. It goes back to my rule for myself [in] making it. — Don Hertzfeldt

I have decided to launch an Exploratory Committee to examine whether I should run for President in 2016. — Jim Webb

Then Brezhnev grabbed the wheel of power and captained the country with the exploratory heart of a municipal bus driver. — Anthony Marra

That might be good news for rationalists - maybe we can think carefully whenever we believe it matters? Not quite. Tetlock found two very different kinds of careful reasoning. Exploratory thought is an "evenhanded consideration of alternative points of view." Confirmatory thought is "a one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular point of view."13 Accountability increases exploratory thought only when three conditions apply: (1) decision makers learn before forming any opinion that they will be accountable to an audience, (2) the audience's views are unknown, and (3) they believe the audience is well informed and interested in accuracy. — Jonathan Haidt

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself ... It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent. — Harper Lee

But then, that's the beauty of writing stories - each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there's no feeling like it.
[Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003] — T.C. Boyle

The purposiveness of all vital processes, the strategy of the genes and the power of the exploratory drive in animal and man, all seem to indicate that the pull of the future is as real as the pressure of the past. — Arthur Koestler

True muses stay dreams forever unless artists connect them to exploratory work. — Robert Genn

Each Voyager is itself a message. In their exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of their objectives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us. — Carl Sagan

Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring
not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive ... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. — Carl Sagan

Most of my projects seem to start as exploratory journeys with no visible end in sight. — Alex Webb

Goddard represented a unique combination of visionary dedication and technological brilliance. He studied physics because he needed physics to get to Mars. In reading the notebooks of Robert Goddard, I am struck by how powerful his exploratory and scientific motivations were - and how influental speculative ideas, even erroneous ones, can be on the shaping of the future. — Carl Sagan

Rather, risk is a perception in each investor's mind that results from analysis of the probability and amount of potential loss from an investment. If an exploratory oil well proves to be a dry hole, it is called risky. If a bond defaults or a stock plunges in price, they are called risky. But if the well is a gusher, the bond matures on schedule, and the stock rallies strongly, can we say they weren't risky when the investment after it is concluded than was known when it was made. — Seth Klarman

But with Freddy I seemed to have the best sort of conversations, where our talk became exploratory and would lead on to new ideas, like thinking aloud, and in the process of clarifying improvisatory theories I always made useful discoveries about what I thought and felt. — Victoria Clayton

Here's a guy and everybody's there, right? Up to him to put down what's on everybody's mind. He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah, yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it - everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He's filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it's not the tune that counts but IT. — Jack Kerouac

What the scientists have always found by physical experiment was an a priori orderliness of nature, or Universe always operating at an elegance level that made the discovering scientist's working hypotheses seem crude by comparison. The discovered reality made the scientists exploratory work seem relatively disorderly. — R. Buckminster Fuller

By forcing a substantial elevation in collective aspirations, stretch goals can shift attention to possible new futures and perhaps spark increased energy in the organization. They thus can prompt exploratory learning through experimentation, innovation, broad search, or playfulness.38 There — Charles Duhigg

Schools are even less efficient in the arrangement of the circumstances which encourage the open-ended, exploratory use of acquired skills, for which I will reserve the term "liberal education." The main reason for this is that school is obligatory and becomes schooling for schooling's sake: an enforced stay in the company of teachers, which pays off in the doubtful privilege of more such company. Just as skill instruction must be freed from curricular restraints, so must liberal education be dissociated from obligatory attendance. Both skill-learning
and education for inventive and creative behavior can be aided by institutional arrangement, but they are of a different, frequently opposed nature. — Ivan Illich

Annabelle drank again. Her face was so numb that she wasn't aware that some of the medicine had dribbled from her lips until Daisy picked up a napkin from the tray and blotted her chin.
Cautiously Annabelle lifted exploratory fingertips to the frozen skin of her face. "Feels so odd," she said, her voice slurred. "No sensation in my mouth. Daisy ... don't say that I was drooling while Mr. Hunt was here?"
"Of course not," Daisy said immediately. "I would have done something about it if you had been. A true friend doesn't let another friend drool when a man is present. — Lisa Kleypas

I think that's something a scientist can do because a scientist works at a border, at the edge of science, at the edge of knowledge, and so there's a lot of fun of reaching out and thinking about things that other people didn't think about. And so it has a kind of exploratory notion, kind of adventurous part in it. — Stefan Hell

The world is not made up of particles and waves and beams of light with a definite existence. Instead, the world works in a much more exploratory way. It is aware of all the possibilities at once and trying them out all the time. That is a hard thing to picture. — Neil Turok

Traditional photojournalists arrive with an idea of what they are going to produce or what the editor wants. I approach a subject very much as a street photographer and a wanderer, without preconceptions. I try to leave it extremely intuitive and exploratory. — Alex Webb

Plenty of girls saw college as some sort of exploratory period. — Tammara Webber

Ultimately the destruction of the Earth is due in part, perhaps in large part, to a failure of the imagination or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can't count what matters. The revolt against this destruction is a revolt of the imagination, in favor of subtleties, of pleasures money can't buy and corporations can't command, of being producers rather than consumers of meaning, of the slow, the meandering, the digressive, the exploratory, the numinous, the uncertain. — Rebecca Solnit

It's always been the case that politicians want different things from children than good educators do. Good educators want imaginative, exploratory beings, but politicians just want economic units. — David Almond

Where I've arrived now is the product of mixing the very straight with the very exploratory; there's a fine line between the two, although it tends to be getting straighter and straighter because my songwriting is getting better. — Andy Partridge

If thinking is confirmatory rather than exploratory in these dry and easy cases, then what chance is there that people will think in an open-minded, exploratory way when self-interest, social identity, and strong emotions make them want or even need to reach a preordained conclusion? 3. WE LIE, CHEAT, AND JUSTIFY SO WELL THAT WE HONESTLY BELIEVE WE ARE HONEST — Jonathan Haidt

I grimace, thinking someone should come up with a new phrase for 'I left the ocean without a kiwi-sized chunk of my lower-left butt cheek' to replace the rather nebulous term 'exploratory bite. — Elle Lothlorien

If i wouldn't have done comedy, I would have been a teacher. I was really good when I took an exploratory teaching class in high school, at getting kids' attention, and delivering lesson plans. Though my principal even told me that this was what I was meant to do. And that being a big-mouth comedian was a waste of time. — Gabriel Iglesias

No construction of thought represents a label, barrier, or a full stop. Each sentence, paragraph, and page represents an exploratory probe into the unknown; each statement is an act of experimentation, investigation, creation, and growth. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Their violence (the jungle wars of the '70s), and all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation that is taking place, within sex as elsewhere and the sense that the perversions are valuable precisely because they provide a readily accessible anthology of exploratory techniques. — J.G. Ballard

The psychologist Geoffrey Miller, when pondering why we haven't come across any alien species as yet, decided that they were probably all addicted to video games and are thus brought to an extreme state of apathy - the exploratory opposite of the heroes in Star Trek who spend all their time seeking out "new life and new civilizations." The — Michael Harris

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental. — Alison Gopnik

Exploratory wells located invariably by a set of deterministic seismic interpretations are drilled into reservoirs under uncertainty that is invariably poorly quantified, the geologic models yawning to be optimized by a mindset that is educated in a data-driven methodology. — Keith Holdaway