Quote

At the beginning we learn to travel, then we travel to learn.

William Least Heat-Moon

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Least Heat-Moon
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: August 27
Historian
Writer
Kansas City
Missouri
Learn
Travel
Beginning

More quotes by William Least Heat-Moon

Image
I've read that a naked eye can see six thousand stars in the hundred billion galaxies, but I couldn't believe it, what with the sky white with starlight. I saw a million stars with one eye and two million with both.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
The negative cost of Lewis and Clark entering the Garden of Eden is that later expeditions regardless of what they were intended to do, later expeditions did not deal with the native peoples with the intelligence with the almost kindly resolve that Lewis and Clark did.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
A true journey, no matter how long the travel takes, has no end.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
There are two kinds of adventurers: those who go truly hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won't.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do - especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
Boredom lies only with the traveler's limited perception and his failure to explore deeply enough. After a while, I found my perception limited.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
One of the sweet and expectable aspects of life afloat is the perpetual present moment one lives in and a perception that time is nothing more than the current, an eternal flowing back to the sea.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
Other than to amuse himself, why should a man pretend to know where he's going or understand what he sees?
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
Our religion keeps reminding us that we aren't just will and thoughts. We're also sand and wind and thunder. Rain. The seasons. All those things. You learn to respect everything because you are everything. If you respect yourself, you respect all things.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
The thing that overwhelms me when I go out now is the sprawlation of America.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
The four horsemen of the prairie are tornado, locust, drought, and fire, and the greatest of these is fire, a rider with two faces because for everything taken, it makes a return in equal measure.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
To say nothing is out here is incorrect to say the desert is stingy with everything except space and light, stone and earth is closer to the truth.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
Having made the trip from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean myself going up up up against twenty-five hundred miles of the Missouri River, I can testify that it's one of the most arduous trips that anyone can make on this continent and yet I had a power boat to do it in.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
New ways of seeing can disclose new thingsĀ… But turn the question around. Do new things make for new ways of seeing?
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
No yesterdays on the road.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
Whoever the last true cowboy in America turns out to be, he's likely to be an Indian.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
Get out and find ...the country. And ourselves.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
Without the errors, wrong turns and blind alleys, without the doubling back and misdirection and fumbling and chance discoveries, there was not one bit of joy in walking the labyrinth.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you've been feeling bad.
William Least Heat-Moon
Image
I have not been on any river that has more of a distinctive personality than does the Missouri River. It's a river that immediately presents to the traveler, 'I am a grandfather spirit. I have a source I have a life.
William Least Heat-Moon