Adventure

“ The books of travel and discovery which I loved to read, had filled my mind with those stories of adventure which attend the explorer of unknown lands,—the wonders of scenery, and the strange pictures of life and people. There was in the career itself that blending of heroism and philanthropy, that mingled courage and humanity, which appealed to my heart by its very strongest sympathies; and I felt for these noble and devoted adventurers not less admiration than love. ”

“ And out of this newly found affinity with the Nature forces, the love of adventure thrills into being, together with the fine scorn of danger and the resolve to do that which we set out to do no matter what the cost or the peril. ”

“ While the thirst of adventure, the master-passion of the middle ages, prompted to any change of scene and circumstances, imagination portrayed the land in view with all that adventitious splendour which none—of all the many betrayers of the human mind—so well knows how to bestow as hope. ”

“ Adventure had been the blood of his life. And out there, behind the green forests rolling away like the billows of an ocean, lay the greatest adventure of all. Once in those beloved forests covering almost the half of a continent, he would be willing to die if the world beat him. ”

“ But under it all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of space. ”

“ I walk in a cloud of wonder; I am glad. I mingle among the crowds; my heart is pounding; You do not guess the adventure I have had! . . . Yet you, too, all have had your dark adventures, Your sudden adventures, or strange, or sweet . . . My peril goes out from me, is blown among you. We loiter, dreaming together, along the street. ”

“ It seems to beckon us to leave the monotonous in habits, people and things in general, and seek renewed youthfulness, the thrill of novelty, the promise of romance amid lands and people far, far away. And we all of us hope that we may not die before we have had one real adventure. Adventure, I suppose, always comes to the really adventurous, but so many people are only half-adventurous; they have all the yearning and the longing, but Nature has bereft them of the power to act. ”

“ The adventure is perfectly promising: an adventure familiar to you withal; for Lecturing is with us fundamentally just what it is with you: Much prurient curiosity, with some ingenuous love of wisdom, an element of real reverence for the same: everywhere a perfect openness to any man speaking in any measure things manful. ”

“ One becomes blasé to adventure, as one becomes blasé to all else which the world can give, save only the simple joys of home, and to taste the full relish of such an expedition one must approach it with the hot blood of youth still throbbing in one's veins. ”

“ He turns aside for no digression that may serve to display his own ingenuity or learning. From the beginning to the end, one adventure commonly rises up and follows upon another, like so many waves of the sea, which cease only because they have reached the shore. ”

“ Life was to him an endless adventure, and the freshness of his curiosity, the tireless spring of youth and romance, and the eagerness with which he attacked any subject, were such as to cause delight in the minds of all men who love to hear of high adventure and are yet debarred from playing their part. ”

“ At any point of an adventure that adventure could be taken over from the very start, the experience holding all the thrill and wonder of the first time.
Cake could be had and eaten too. Tim, half-way down a rabbit-hole, could instantly find himself at the opening again, bursting with all the original excitement of trembling calculations. ”

“ He had bitten his teeth all his life on the despair of adventure, but now it came upon him that life itself is the great adventure, and love the crown of it. Say he, loving a woman, went out to fight the dragons of the way. ”

“ The spirit of adventure that made him in youth the first huntsman of his day took later and graver form in an activity that found time amidst the cares of state for the daily duties of religion, for converse with strangers, for study and translation, for learning poems by heart, for planning buildings and instructing craftsmen in gold work, for teaching even falconers and dog-keepers their business.... ”

“ Steadily hath the wanderer held on day after day, through fair and foul, into the dark waste, alone, like some atom upon the surface, and still breasting the wave, as if eternity was before her in those rolling seas.
Strange that the spirit of adventure should sustain men in such a hopeless-looking wilderness! That the desire of finding new worlds, or their greed after gold, should take them from all they hold dear in their own land. ”

“ The temper of adventure is deeply ingrained in the new romance as in the old; the very word adventure is saturated with a sentiment very congenial to us both for better and worse; it quickens the hero in us and flatters the devil-may-care.
In its simplest form the temper of adventure has given us the profusion of pleasant verses which we know as the poetry of 'vagabondage' and 'the open road'. ”

“ This spirit of adventure that makes men willing to face danger, and even death, to get some new experience or to render some service, the spirit that makes some men explore strange places, or seek for the South Pole, or fight in great battles—this spirit of adventure never dies. Sometimes the story is of a knight clad in armor, and sometimes it is about a man in khaki who died the other day that his fellows might live—the spirit is the same. ”

“ Do not try to satisfy the curiosity or gratify all the latent adventure surging within the soul in one short life in the flesh. Be patient! be not tempted to indulge in a lawless plunge into cheap and sordid adventure. Harness your energies and bridle your passions; be calm while you await the majestic unfolding of an endless career of progressive adventure and thrilling discovery. ”

“ Only the spirit of adventure had led him at twenty-one into the wild places of the world, where he saw existence from many angles, and in a rough outdoor life had brought to perfection physical powers which had been remarkable even in boyhood. ”

“ That would be an adventure worth trying! Maybe we are not so deeply permeated with the culture of to-day that we could not throw it off. Surely the spirit of the heroes strikes home to our hearts as we read of them in the ancient books. ”

“ In books of adventure the dividing line would fall between, on the one side, those stories where the hero is actuated by pure love of adventure or where the adventure is worth while in itself—as in "Foul play" ”

“ No excursion you ever made in pursuit of mere enjoyment and adventure by river, heath, or hill, could give you more hearty pleasure than a ramble, with eyes and ears alike open to note the lessons to be learned from every day and from every landscape. ”

“ But surely we can do better at an interpretation than tales of hunting, of impossible heroisms, and of war. Or at least, we can protest against having these almost the sole interpretations of adventure [Pg 32] which are offered to children. The world of industry holds possibilities for adventure as thrilling as the world of high-colored romance. ”

“ These novels of adventure which we buy so cheerfully, read with such pleasure, and make such a good-natured fuss over, are for the greater part an expression of something altogether foreign to the deeper spirit of modern fiction. ”

“ There are holy saints and scoundrels among adventurers, but all the thousands I have known were fools of the romantic temperament, dealing with life as an artist does with canvas, to color it with fierce and vivid feeling, deep shade and radiant light, exulting in the passions of the sea, the terrors of the wilderness, the splendors of sunshine and starlight, the exaltation of battle, fire and hurricane. ”

“ So they scrambled onward and upward, slipping often on the rapidly freezing rocks, helping each other over difficult places, sighing for nailed boots and alpenstocks, but laughing and enjoying the fun of the adventure. ”

“ Active adventure, real life within the whole domain of nature, was their condition of enjoyment; and, consequently, the secluded footpaths, the fine old green and lonely lanes, the umbrageous bosky dell, with its clear babbling brook, and rich with plants, insects, and minerals, were their haunts. ”

“ The rigour with which any appearance of pursued or desired adventure is kept down—adventure in the florid sense of the word, the sense in which it remains an euphemism—is not the least interesting note of the whole immense promiscuity. ”

“ This you would do unless you are one of the blessed few in whom the pure spirit of adventure is not dead.
True adventurers have never been plentiful. They who are set down in print as such have been mostly business men with newly invented methods. They have been out after the things they wanted—golden fleeces, holy grails, lady loves, treasure, crowns and fame. The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. ”

“ Why, I'd like nothing better than to achieve Some bold adventure, worthy of our trip. ”

“ I had the firm conviction that, if I went about looking for adventure, adventure would meet me halfway. It is a theory of mine that one always gets what one wants. ”

“ So let the way wind up the hill or down,
O'er rough or smooth, the journey will be joy:
Still seeking what I sought when but a boy,
New friendship, high adventure, and a crown,
My heart will keep the courage of the quest,
And hope the road's last turn will be the best. ”

“ Why of adventures more than of green spectacles? He mentions a category of impossible things, and among them he places “fiction without adventure.” Why without adventure, more than without matrimony, or celibacy, or parturition, or cholera, or hydropathy, or Jansenism? This seems to me to bring the novel back to the hapless little rôle of being an artificial, ingenious thing—bring it down from its large, free character of an immense and exquisite correspondence with life. ”

“ In the first place, you needn’t sneer at adventure when you are living it yourself; and you were certainly living it when I found you first, down with fever on a lonely plantation with a couple of hundred wild cannibals thirsting for your life. ”

“ With years will come a desire to depart this life in one piece, after the common joys are realized that life is able to offer. The quick-burning fever for wild adventure dies away with the approach of workable theories of life. ”

“ Dazzling by its glitter, pomp, and pageantry, it begets a spirit of wild adventure and romantic enterprise, and often disqualifies those who embark in it, after their return from the bloody fields of battle, for engaging in the industrious and peaceful vocations of life. ”

“ A few of these we call adventures because they are out of the ordinary. If, however, one is keen and alert, every experience is a fresh adventure. And excitement galore can be had by reading about the doings of other people. It is no longer necessary to hunt lions or to be adrift on an ice sheet to get the thrill of those who have experienced these things. Books, pictures, and theaters afford us ample means of enjoying in comfort the hour of high adventure of the other person. ”

“ When a gorgeous sunset thus impressed the imagination of men on their travels, the age was sure to be one of exploration and wild adventure; and there could not but be a succession of adventurers till the rovers had at least sailed round the globe, and ascertained its great continents and main seas. ”

“ Few in number are the persons who will not gladly escape from humdrum routine by losing themselves in an exciting tale of adventure. The thrilling exploits in real life of the engineer, the explorer, the soldier of fortune, the pioneer in any field, hold us spellbound. Even more commonplace experiences are not without an element of the adventurous, for life itself is a great adventure. Many special feature stories in narrative form have much the same interest that is created by the fictitious tale of adventure. ”

“ ADVENTURERS
What is an adventurer? One who has adventures? Surely not. A person charged by a wild rhinoceros is having an adventure, yet however wild the animal, however wild the person, he is only somebody wishing himself at home, not an adventurer. In dictionaries the adventurer is “one who seeks his fortune in new and hazardous or perilous enterprises.” ”

“ Important and exciting experiences, full of wild adventure and instructive facts, which seem to possess a mysterious charm for every mind, and in which the spirit of intelligent and adventurous curiosity is everywhere prominent. ”

“ The books so fired me with the desire for travel, adventure, romance, that I was [26] miserable most of the time. ”

“ Adventure's not a thing that you find yourself. It's something that comes and finds you—once in a life-time. I'll bet that in three months of trying you couldn't, to save your life, have a real adventure in this town—I mean an adventure out of the ordinary. Elopements and automobile smash-ups are barred."
"How much will you bet?" asked Judson Green. ”

“ It represents, among other things, a hunting pattern of interest. “Adventure” is what the young boy wants, and stories of adventure. Hunting trips are enticing; they are the survival of natural life. All sports are of the hunting pattern; there is a contest of skill, daring, and cunning. ”

“ But surely that manly spirit of adventure which has driven men to the North Pole and the desert, and made them battle with delight against apparently impossible odds, can here find its appropriate sublimation? ”