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Quotes of the Day for 22 May 2005 - Maps

Abraham Ortelius, a Flemish scholar and geographer, published Theatrum Orbis Terrarum on this day in 1570. This volume comprised 70 maps, the first atlas ever published. Apparently it was a useful idea, the Library of Congress collection includes not only a copy of this precedent-setting work, but over 53,000 more recent atlases.

The method of the enterprising is to plan with audacity, and execute with vigor; to sketch out a map of possibilities, and then to treat them as probabilities.
     - Christian Nestell Bovee, 1820 - 1904

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.
     - Oscar Wilde, 1854 - 1900

It is not down in any map; true places never are.
     - Herman Melville, 1819 - 1891

The world can doubtless never be well known by theory: practice is absolutely necessary; but surely it is of great use to a young man, before he sets out for that country, full of mazes, windings, and turnings, to have at least a general map of it, made by some experienced traveller.
     - Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, 1694 - 1773

Australia is a big blank map, and the whole people is constantly sitting over it like a committee, trying to work out the best way to fill it in.
     - Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean, 1879 - 1968

I have an existential map. It has "You are here" written all over it.
     - Steven Wright

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