Ted Simon Quotes

• People who thought of my journey as a physical ordeal or an act of courage... missed the point. Courage and physical endurance were no more than useful items of equipment for me, like facility with languages or immunity to hepatitis. The goal was comprehension, and the only way to comprehend the world was by making myself vulnerable to it so that it could change me. The challenge was to lay myself open to everybody and everything that came my way. The prize was to change and grow big enough to feel one with the whole world.

  Ted Simon

  Journey, Goal, People

  45 Copy quote

• That night I lie out under the stars again. The Pleiades are there winking at me. I am no longer on my way from one place to another. I have changed lives. My life now is as black and white as night and day; a life of fierce struggle under the sun, and peaceful reflection under the night sky. I feel as though I am floating on a raft far, far away from any world I ever knew.

  Ted Simon

  Stars, Lying, Struggle

  23 Copy quote

• I am learning, as I make my way through my first continent, that it is remarkably easy to do things, and much more frightening to contemplate them.

  Ted Simon

  Firsts, Way, Easy

  Ted Simon (2007). “Jupiter's Travels”, p.194, Penguin UK

  4 Copy quote

• It was going to be the journey of a lifetime, a journey that millions
  dream of and never make, and I wanted to do justice to all those dreams.

  Ted Simon

  Dream, Journey, Justice

  4 Copy quote

• It was chilling to realize that the sentimental qualities most valued between people, like loyalty, constancy, and affection, are the ones most likely to impede change.

  Ted Simon

  Loyalty, People, Society

  7 Copy quote

• To be worth making at all a journey has to be made in the mind as much as in the world of objects and dimensions. What value can there be in seeing or experiencing anything for the first time unless it comes as a revelation? And for that to happen, some previously held thought or belief must be confounded, or enhanced, or even transcended. What difference can it make otherwise to see a redwood tree, a tiger, or a humming bird?

  Ted Simon

  Journey, Differences, Bird

  Ted Simon (1984). “Riding Home”

  4 Copy quote

• There are in me the seeds from which, if necessary, the universe could be constructed. In me somewhere there is a matrix for mankind and a holograph for the whole world. Nothing is more important in my life than trying to discover these secrets.

  Ted Simon

  Secret, Trying, Important

  4 Copy quote

• Nobody is free… Everyone has a prison. Wife, parents, children, they all make prisons.

  Ted Simon

  Children, Wife, Parent

  6 Copy quote

• The Latin American has no tribe to fall back on, as the African does, no reliable judiciary to defend his rights as the European does, no social ideal or sacred constitution as the North American does, no pervasive mythology to soften life as it does in Asia, and no even an ideology to subscribe to, as does the Russian or Chinese. Without wealth, what is there left to him but his manhood, to be flaunted and defended at every occasion?

  Ted Simon

  Latin, Fall, Rights

  4 Copy quote

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