Maps Quotes

“I was eleven when everything started and twelve by the end. But that’s another way that maps don’t tell the whole truth – because it felt like the distance I travelled was a lot further than that.”
― Danielle Binks, The Year the Maps Changed

“A Musafir in life
today I am here on
this side of the border
tomorrow I will be there
on the other side.

Searching for meaning
with my pen and journal
in my bag, I keep drifting
from here to there and
from there to here

A Musafir in life
there is no final home for me
no final destination awaits me
To keep on traveling is
my life's story
To keep on searching is
my life's purpose”
― Avijeet Das

“It was a grand plan, which would have taxed the imperial treasure to its limits to accomplish. It would have needed more men than the mind can encompass, men to map and men to measure, surveyors, census-takers, painters; it would have taken model-makers, potters, builders, and craftsmen. Six hundred professional dreamers would have been needed to reveal the nature of things hidden beneath the roots of trees, and in the deepest mountain caverns, and in the depths of the sea, for the map, to be worth anything, needed to contain both the visible empire and the invisible.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“But ideas can be true although men die,
And we can watch a thousand faces
Made active by one lie:

And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking; Dachau.”
― W.H. Auden, Journey to a War

“My own heart
neither so brave nor so willing
– leaving no lines on the maps
yet silently evolving”
― Tamara Rendell, Mystical Tides

“People always ask me, they say, “Jarod, what do you do with your money?” Well, I base my financial decisions on the annual migratory patterns of Bigfoot, because maps are the new charts, as taught by the esteemed Ponce de Leon School of Youth, Wealth, and Duck Farming. Next time you’re in St. Augustine, Fl, or here in The Ozarks, you should stop on by and learn to become your own cartographer.”
― Jarod Kintz, Eggs, they’re not just for breakfast

“What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, intently studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit, tracing the course of obscure rivers, checking elevations, consulting the marginal notes to see what a little circle with a flag on it signifies and what's the difference between a pictogram of an airplane with a circle around it and one without, issuing small profound "hmmmms" and nodding my head gravely without having the faintest idea why.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

“The essential traits we associate with maps today evolved gradually over millennia. We first see cardinal directions on Babylonian clay tablet maps from five thousand years ago, for instance, but distances don’t appear on maps for three thousand more years—our oldest such example is a bronze plate from China’s Zhou Dynasty. Centuries more pass before we get to our oldest surviving paper map, a Greek papyrus depicting the Iberian Peninsula around the time of Christ. The first compass rose appears in the Catalan Atlas of 1375. “Chloropleth” maps—those in which areas are colored differently to represent different values on some scale, like the red-and-blue maps on election night—date back only to 1826.”
― Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

“Columbus’s fateful voyage was inspired by his study of a map by Paolo Toscanelli. But there was also the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, which killed hundreds of people until a physician, John Snow, drew a map demonstrating that a single contaminated water pump was the source of the illness, thereby founding the science of epidemiology. There was the 1944 invasion at Normandy, which succeeded only because of the unheralded contribution of mapmakers who had stolen across the English Channel by night for months before D-Day and mapped the French beaches.* Even the moon landing was a product of mapping. In 1961, the United States Geological Survey founded a Branch of Astrogeology, which spent a decade painstakingly assembling moon maps to plan the Apollo missions. The Apollo 11 crew pored over pouches of those maps as their capsule approached the lunar surface, much as Columbus did during his voyage. It seems that the greatest achievements in human history have all been made possible by the science of cartography.”
― Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

“For the canny traveler, the map is dotted with tourist traps that were once something sincere, something worthy of reverence that gave way to branded merchandise. We follow the billboards that are as accurate as those guiding us to the Corn Palace or the World’s Largest Ball of Twine, kick at the dirt a bit, watch an overinflated PowerPoint or squint at a dusty artifact, peek at the gift shop, and go home with less money but nothing in value gained. These sites are mental stamps that one was in a place where something had once mattered, but the veil between Then and Now is thick and impermeable.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Holidays with Bigfoot

“In an important sense, therefore, Benjamin’s biography describes the construction of a map not meant for the eye.”
― Brian Elliott, Benjamin for Architects

“It's easy to forget that old maps were once statements of the very latest in thinking: new visions brimming with the potential and power of up-to-date knowledge. The unknowns in such maps were warnings, certainly, but also became advertisements. When made visible on the chart they invited perilous new journeys as much as cautioned against them.”
― Huw Lewis-Jones, The Writer's Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands

“Rip up the maps. Burn them. Let them fly. Give thanks for all the well-meaning advice you've been given. Start afresh. Go against what you've been taught if you need to. It may feel uncomfortable, but that's only because it's new.”
― Kris Franken, The Call of Intuition: How to Recognize & Honor Your Intuition, Instinct & Insight

“Sometimes the exact picture doesn't tell you enough. Sometimes the map is the truth, the picture is a lie.”
― Anna Morgan, All That Impossible Space

“Intentions are like expressways on the map to your future”
― Rachel D. Greenwell, How To Wear A Crown: A Practical Guide To Knowing Your Worth

“Then Mr. Pratt handed me a map.

The less said about this map, the better. You can put anything you like upon a map: roads, rivers, villages, towns, grasslands, water pools, mountain passes, and plenty more. Paper is patient, it won’t refuse anything; but though a river or a bridge appears on a map it doesn’t mean that you’re going to find it where it is supposed to be. (The Cattle Drive)”
― B. Traven, The Night Visitor and Other Stories

“A lot of people spend all of their lives sorting through maps. And while that might make them an expert regarding the route, they never set foot on the road.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“There was a small commercial area a little further on, clustered around a crossroads where a huge latticework globe stood on a plinth of black baserock. Maps, some entire and others patchworked from islands or continents, none bigger than a child’s hand, were scattered thinly across its surface. The home map, Gea, was a squarish red tile close to the equator, smaller than most of the rest, and a silvery ball representing the Heartsun was spindled at the centre, and everything was spattered by the droppings of a fractious parliament of vivid green birds which had colonised the globe’s pole, chattering each to each and scolding passers-by.”
― Paul McAuley, War of the Maps

“I am not lying, the map that I drew was something that you would stop to look at. Audubon himself would have stopped and whistled, which is just what Mr. Barber did. Then he crouched next to me, and the sent of this coffee steamed up.
"Douglas, did you trace that?"
"Nope."
"And those seagulls?"
"I thought they would add realism."
"They're fantastic," Mr. Barber said.
"Thanks," I said.
He whistled again. Then he stood up and took a step.”
― Schmidt, Gary D.

“I realized that they make maps in their heads – scent maps, event maps, thing maps, texture maps, sequential maps – that much of their activity on the trails is mapmaking and map following. I know why Ben whines for me to open the car windows as we drive. His mapmaking needs the scent element. A ride in the car is mapmaking in the fast lane. New places, new smells, new maps, enlarge brains. The world is a newspaper. It is my world my dogs are mapping, my world they are imprinting. Now I pay attention to their world: the tree limb, the new hole, the crushed hay where to deer slept. I begin to tread as they do. I am allowed, as I learn to pay attention, to participate, as my dogs do, in the wonders of the natural world, a world from which I had grown far apart.”
― Rhoda Lerman, In the Company of Newfies: A Shared Life

“Robert Burton was right: maps are a certain cure for melancholy.”
― Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah

“The map is not the territory. The man is not the file.”
― Eric Flint, Changer of Worlds

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― Zameen Locator

“From cave paintings depicting hunting grounds to the Babylonian tablets capturing the "whole world" (as they experienced it). Through the advancements of the Middle Ages, especially from Islamic scholars and Chinese cartographers. Massive strides came about with the Renaissance, as exploration and expansion abounded. Then on to the massive leaps to modern surveying and satellite imagery. The journey has been astonishing!

I cannot help but think that this mirrors the path of our understanding of God and the world They created. Our sincere, yet limited perspectives began to expand as our experience and understanding grew. The reality of that which we sought to "map out" was (and is) often our best efforts, complicated by ignorance, limitations, bias, and more. We imperfectly stumble towards better, more honest representations.

Even then, our growing understanding helps us see the limitations of our own attempts to bring meaning to that which is so much bigger than our capacity to fully understand. Just as we know that the Mercator projection map is deeply problematic and, in many ways, wildly incorrect, so too do so many of our understandings of the Divine often fail to meet our own standards. And in the same way, we also hold on to them because they are familiar and we are so deeply invested in them.

And in the end, no matter how good and accurate and true our "maps" are, they will always and only ever be mere representations- pale reflections of a much grander, complex, and ever-changing reality.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“At the side of every living city, town, or hamlet, there is always a dead city or town, as the shadow is always beside the body. Geography, therefore, is always double, although you speak only of that which appears most agreeable. To make a map of all the cemeteries upon earth would suffice to explain the political geography of thy world.”
― Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, The Strange Friend of Tito Gil

“... one map cannot tell the whole story, and healthy skepticism is essential because map authors who don't understand or otherwise ignore cartographic principles can commit misleading blunders.”
― Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps

“The Earth's plates were moving, and while she didn't know why or how, she did know that the men around her were going to have to catch up.”
― Hali Felt, Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor

“On the geological calendar, all of recorded history takes place during the last four seconds of New Year's Eve. 12:59:56, 12:59:57, 12:59:58, 12:59:59. When scaled down, everything humans know about anything, everything we love, everything we've made - condensed into four seconds. We come and go in the amount of time it takes to uncap a bottle of water and take a sip, sign on the dotted line, or fasten a seat belt.”
― Hali Felt, Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor

“One map, titled “Mediterranean without Borders,” by French cartographer Sabine Réthoré, turns our view ninety degrees to the right, the “west” facing up—imagine North Africa to the left and Europe into Turkey to the right with equal stature, the Levant stretching to Egypt at the bottom, and the Rock of Gibraltar at top. Our perspective shifts, the Mediterranean Sea unfolding almost like a lake, the shores mirroring each other along these ancient corridors dotted by islands and waterways. It’s a busy thoroughfare. The Mediterranean is “probably the most vigorous place of interaction,” as eminent historian David Abulafia observed, “between different societies on the face of this planet.”

There in the upper reaches, the island of Sardinia sits in the middle, a focal point of entry and inspection. Instead of being on the periphery of empires or a nebulous island west of the Italian mainland, Sardinia is central to the Mediterranean story and a nexus for navigators heading in any direction. The idea of isolation, as one medieval historian would note, no longer appears “tenable.”
― Jeff Biggers, In Sardinia: An Unexpected Journey in Italy