Outward Journey Quotes & Sayings

There was no desire in him for a state or condition, no picture in his mind of the thing to be when he had followed his longing; but only a burning and a will overpowering to journey outward and outward after the earliest risen star. — John Steinbeck

It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get
the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke
that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens ... and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch. — David Foster Wallace

Being responsible is taking ownership of your life. It means you have taken the first radical step to becoming a complete human being - fully conscious and fully human. In taking responsibility and beginning the journey toward conscious living, you are putting an end to the age-old patterns of assigning blame outward or heavenward. You have begun the greatest adventure life has to offer: the voyage inward. — Sadhguru

To a greater or lesser extent there goes on in every person a struggle between two forces: the longing for privacy and the urge to go places: the introversion, interest directed within oneself toward one's own inner life of vigorous thought and fancy; and extroversion, interest directed outward, toward the external world of people and tangible values. — Vladimir Nabokov

I was saddened to learn of the passing of Leonard Nimoy, a fellow space traveler because he helped make the journey into the final frontier accessible to us all ... Indeed, there are strange new worlds to explore
to seek out new life and start new civilizations. It is time to boldly go where no man
or woman
has gone before. Thanks to Leonard Nimoy and his beloved Mr. Spock, the bar has been set high for us to continue humanity's quest to probe outward in the universe. — Buzz Aldrin

Since God lives in the heart, I was not to seek some Being way up in the sky . . . my journey to God was not outward, but inward! The only way to get closer to God was to become ordered enough inside to enable me to experience him within. When our emotions are running loose, and our minds are confused . . . and our imagination is working overtime, there's so much internal noise that we can't hear the still voice of God.

So many times over my years as a mother I had felt tired, overwhelmed, and worn out So often I felt I couldn't get any personal space to think, what with the continual onslaught of "Mummy! Mummy!" coming from the children, or the work that I hadn't finished staring me in the face. I needed quiet time alone. — Holly Pierlot

No matter how cleverly we disguise our anxieties they bear witness to the imperfect nature of the human heart. To be is to become. To become is not to be. We are a work-in-progress, incomplete, imperfect, unrealised, and by virtue of temporal actions, temporary - a verb more than a noun, an inner quest and an outward odyssey framed by metaphors, like Escher's "Print Gallery"; we make the endless journey round the pictures, retracing our steps in forgetfulness, avoiding but mindful of the space where there are no pictures, where there is no gallery, where there is nothing at all. And like flies in a fly bottle, trapped by a failure of vision, we go round and round and round the moebius loop of a print gallery of our own making, a picture inside a picture inside a picture, forever. — Billy Marshall Stoneking

I do believe that the outward and the inward life correspond; that if any should succeed to live a higher life, others would not know of it; that difference and distance are one. To set about living a true life is to go on a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men; and as long as the old are around me, I know that I am not in any true sense living a new or a better life. — Henry David Thoreau

I wish I were rich enough to endow a prize for the sensible traveler: £10,000 for the first man to over Marco Polo's outward route, reading three fresh books a week, and another £10,000 if he a drinks a bottle of wine a day as well. That man might tell one something about the journey. He might or might not be naturally observant. But at least he would use what eyes he had, and would not think it necessary to dress up the result in thrills that never happened and science no deeper than its own jargon. — Robert Byron

The more you are called to speak for God's love, the more you will need to deepen the knowledge of that love in your own heart. The farther the outward journey takes you, the deeper the inward journey must be. Only when your roots are deep can your fruits be abundant. — Henri Nouwen

Know that the science of unveiling has no end to it, for it consists in the journey of the intellect in the stations of Majesty, Beauty, Sublimeness, Grandeur, and Holiness ... He to whom the mysteries of La ilaha illa'llah are revealed draws near to God, and his worship of God becomes sincere. He does not turn to anyone but to Him, nor does he have hope in or fear other than Him, nor does he see harm or benefit except as coming from Him. He abandons whosoever is not He and rids himself of inward and outward associationism (shirk). — Ibn Ata Allah

Etymologically, a homestead is a home place, the focus of a story. And the word "home" derives from the ancient root for bed or couch, the place where we lie down to rest. The journey begins, then, in repose, unconsciousness, or sleep. We go out to awaken, hoping to return both wiser and more refreshed. The path soars outward, then bends back, inscribing its parabolic arc. — John Tallmadge

You walk to toward the center (of the labyrinth), towards the source of that order, releasing the chaos of daily life, seeking wisdom and wholeness. On the outward journey you return to the world -- metaphorically -- with the insights gained within. — Kristen Heitzmann

The lessons are in the quest. The answers are found in the journey. These are ripples on a pond. They spread outward. And on we walk ... — Thomas Norman DeWolf

The fairy tale journey may look like an outward trek across plains and mountains, through castles and forests, but the actual movement is inward, into the lands of the soul. — Terri Windling

The farther the outward journey takes you, the deeper the inward journey must be. — Henri Nouwen

The spiritual journey is one that we must take "alone together," in the same way that a good marriage involves a dance between solitude and communion. The life of the spirit entails a continuous alternation between retreating into oneself and going out into the world: it's an inward-outward journey. There is a solitary part to it, but that solitude helps us to develop richer and more in-depth relationships with our friends, our children, our community, and the political world. — Sam Keen

When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within ourselves. It radiates towards the loved one, finds there a surface which arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting-point, and it is this repercussion of our own feeling which we call the other's feelings and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognise it as having originated in ourselves. — Marcel Proust