…he retained to his last hour his taste for the adventurous, the singular, and the uncommon, and never was steady enough to pursue perseveringly the drudgery of life.
~The O’Hara Family (Michael Banim), The Ghost-Hunter and His Family, 1833
So that was the beginning of our big adventure. Before so very long we had Alice in Wonderland tearing her hair from jealousy.
~Percy Keese Fitzhugh, Roy Blakeley: Lost, Strayed or Stolen, 1921
Adventures are things that happen that aren’t supposed to happen.
~Percy Keese Fitzhugh, Roy Blakeley: Lost, Strayed or Stolen, 1921
And the strongest emotion was that life was as precious as it was puzzling. It was an ecstacy because it was an adventure; it was an adventure because it was an opportunity.
~G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Well; keep good quarter and good care to-night:
~William Shakespeare, King John, c.1596 [V, 5, Lewis]
The day shall not be up so soon as I,
To try the fair adventure of to-morrow.
To pitch my tent with no prosy plan,
~Robert W. Service (1874–1958), “A Rolling Stone,” 1912
To range and to change at will;
To mock at the mastership of man,
To seek Adventure’s thrill.
Perhaps the greatest adventure in life is that period between the ignorance of knowledge and the knowledge of ignorance, called Middle Age.
~Kenneth Alfred Evelyn Alexander, “The I.O.U.’s Have It,” 1931
Strickland had burst the bonds that hitherto had held him. He had found, not himself, as the phrase goes, but a new soul with unsuspected powers… a spirituality, troubling and new, which led the imagination along unsuspected ways, and suggested dim empty spaces, lit only by the eternal stars, where the soul, all naked, adventured fearful to the discovery of new mysteries.
~W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence, 1919
Adventure is what happens when you just did something stupid.
~Professor Bernie
Adventure stands at every cross-road and only the dun-grey kind with the one-way mind ignore him. But the variety-artist knows what his nose knows and goes where his nose goes, for it’s hinged, although apparently unhinged, and if it leads him into trouble it also teaches him the scent of it.
~Kenneth Alfred Evelyn Alexander (c.1890–1953), “The One-Way Mind,” in The New Zealand Railways Magazine, 1931 June 1st
A moderate adventure is no adventure.
~Terri Guillemets, “Living the sky,” 2012
It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves — in finding themselves.
~André Gide
Adventure may sometimes hurt, but monotony will kill you.
~Author unknown
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
~Helen Keller, Let Us Have Faith, 1940
The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sight-seeing”…
~Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: or, What Happened to the American Dream, 1962
But what civilization was not founded on adventure, and how long could one exist without it? What justifies the risk of life? Some answer, the attainment of knowledge. Some say wealth, or power, is sufficient cause. I believe the risks are justified by the sheer love of the life I lead.
~Charles Lindbergh
I think it’s about adventure. The test of an adventure is that when you’re in the middle of it, you say to yourself, “Oh, now I’ve got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.” And the sign that something’s wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure…
~Thornton Wilder
Now nothing happened the next week except going to school, and gee whiz, there’s no adventure in that.
~Percy Keese Fitzhugh, Roy Blakeley: Lost, Strayed or Stolen, 1921
Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
~W. Somerset Maugham
That breeze in your soul is adventure calling.
~Terri Guillemets
A library card is the start of a lifelong adventure.
~Lilian Jackson Braun (1913–2011)
In gardening, go lightly on caution, heavily on adventure, and see what comes out.
~Ruth Stout, “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back, 1955
If life is not an adventure it’s a sad venture, and drear at the price. After all life is after all; it is not what you make it, but what it makes you.
~Kenneth Alfred Evelyn Alexander (c.1890–1953), “Live Wires and Dead Marines,” in The New Zealand Railways Magazine, 1931 June 1st
Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.
~Edwin Powell Hubble, “The Exploration of Space,” c.1933
Spend time barefoot with adventure and joy.
~Terri Guillemets, “Heart & sole,” 2019, blackout poetry created from Mary Carter, Return to Hampton Beach, 2014, chapter 8
Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
~Alfred North Whitehead