Excursion meaning

Noun: excursion

Pronunciation: (ik’skur-zhun or ek’skur-zhun or ik’skur-shun)

Excursion meaning:

• A journey taken for pleasure

Synonyms: jaunt, outing, junket, pleasure trip, expedition, sashay

• Wandering from the main path of a journey

Synonyms: digression

Derived forms: excursions

Quotations:

1. Aleister Crowley – But it so happens that everything on this planet is, ultimately, irrational; there is not, and cannot be, any reason for the causal connection of things, if only because our use of the word reason already implies the idea of causal connection. But, even if we avoid this fundamental difficulty, Hume said that causal connection was not merely unprovable, but unthinkable; and, in shallower waters still, one cannot assign a true reason why water should flow down hill, or sugar taste sweet in the mouth. Attempts to explain these simple matters always progress into a learned lucidity, and on further analysis retire to a remote stronghold where every thing is irrational and unthinkable. If you cut off a man’s head, he dies. Why? Because it kills him. That is really the whole answer. Learned excursions into anatomy and physiology only beg the question; it does not explain why the heart is necessary to life to say that it is a vital organ. Yet that is exactly what is done, the trick that is played on every inquiring mind. Why cannot I see in the dark? Because light is necessary to sight. No confusion of that issue by talk of rods and cones, and optical centers, and foci, and lenses, and vibrations is very different to Edwin Arthwait’s treatment of the long-suffering English language. Knowledge is really confined to experience. The laws of Nature are, as Kant said, the laws of our minds, and, as Huxley said, the generalization of observed facts. It is, therefore, no argument against ceremonial magic to say that it is absurd to try to raise a thunderstorm by beating a drum; it is not even fair to say that you have tried the experiment, found it would not work, and so perceived it to be impossible. You might as well claim that, as you had taken paint and canvas, and not produced a Rembrandt, it was evident that the pictures attributed to his painting were really produced in quite a different way. You do not see why the skull of a parricide should help you to raise a dead man, as you do not see why the mercury in a thermometer should rise and fall, though you elaborately pretend that you do; and you could not raise a dead man by the aid of the skull of a parricide, just as you could not play the violin like Kreisler; though in the latter case you might modestly add that you thought you could learn. This is not the special pleading of a professed magician; it boils down to the advice not to judge subjects of which you are perfectly ignorant, and is to be found, stated in clearer and lovelier language, in the Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley.
2. Eudora Welty – The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.
3. John Kennedy Toole – The only excursion of my life outside of New Orleans took me through the vortex to the whirlpool of despair: Baton Rouge, New Orleans is, on the other hand, a comfortable metropolis which has a certain apathy and stagnation which I find inoffensive.
4. Philip Roth – And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint’s, it’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania.
5. Franz Kafka – I don’t know, I cried without being heard, I do not know, If nobody comes, then nobody comes. I’ve done nobody any harm, nobody’s done me any harm, but nobody will help me. A pack of nobodies. Yet that isn’t all true. Only, that nobody helps me – a pack of nobodies would be rather fine, on the other hand. I’d love to go on an excursion why not? – with a pack of nobodies. Into the mountains, of course, where else? How these nobodies jostle each other, all these lifted arms linked together, these numberless feet treading so close! Of course they are all in dress suits. We go so gaily, the wind blows through us and the gaps in our company. Our throats swell and are free in the mountains! It’s a wonder that we don’t burst into song.
6. Tessa Dare- What I recall is this: this native people he lived with, deep in the jungle – their language had dozens of words for rain. Because it was so common to them, you see. Where they lived, it rained almost constantly. Several times a day. So they had words for light rain, and heavy rain, and pounding rain. Something like eighteen different terms for storms, and a whole classification system for mist. Why are you telling me this? His touch skimmed lightly down her arm. Because I’m standing here, wanting to give you fitting compliment, but my paltry vocabulary fails me. I think what I need is a scientific excursion. I need to venture deep into some jungle where beauty takes the place of rain. Where loveliness itself falls from the sky at regular intervals. Dots every surface, saturates the ground, hangs like vapor in the air. Because the way you look right now. His gaze caught hers in the reflection. They’d have a word for it there.
7. Henry David Thoreau – I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way. But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb.
8. Brigham Young – Now, remember, my brethren, those who go skating, buggy riding or on excursions on the Sabbath day and there is a great deal of this practiced are weak in the faith. Gradually, little by little, little by little, the spirit of their religion leaks out of their hearts and their affections, and by and by they begin to see faults in their brethren, faults in the doctrines of the Church, faults in the organization, and at last they leave the Kingdom of God and go to destruction. I really wish you would remember this, and tell it to your neighbors.

Sample sentences:

1. We two boys together clinging, One the other never leaving, Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making. Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching. Armed and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving. No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening, misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on the turf or the sea-beach dancing, Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing. Fulfilling our foray.
2. What is there to see if I go outside? Don’t tell me. I know. I can see other people. I don’t want to see other people. They look awful. The men look like slobs and the women look like men. The men have mush faces framed by long hair and the women have big noses, big jaws, big heads, and stick-like bodies. That depresses me. Its no fun to people-watch anymore because there’s so little variety in types. You say it’s good to get a change of scenery. What scenery, New buildings, New cars, New freeways, New shopping malls? Go to the woods or a park? I saw a tree once. The new ones look the same, which is fine. I even remember what the old ones look like. My memory isn’t that short. But it’s not worth going to see a squirrel grab a nut, or fish swimming around in a big tank if I must put up with the ugly contemporary human pollution that accompanies each excursion. The squirrel may enliven me and remind me of better vistas but the price in social interaction isn’t worth it. If, on my way to visit the squirrel, I encounter a single person who gains stimulation by seeing me, I feel like I have given more than I’ve received and I get sore. If every time I go somewhere to see a fish swimming, I become someone else’s stimulation, I feel shortchanged. I’ll buy my own fish and watch it swim. Then, I can watch the fish, the fish can watch me, we can be friends, and nobody else interferes with the interaction, like trying to hear what the fish and I are talking about. I won’t have to get dressed a certain way to visit the fish. I needn’t dress the way my pride dictates, because who’s going to see me? I needn’t wear any pants. The fish doesn’t care. He doesn’t read the tabloids. But, if I go out to see a fish other than my own, I’m right back where I started: entertaining others, which is more depleting than visiting the new fish is entertaining. Maybe I should go to a coffee house. I find no stimulation in watching ordinary people trying to put the make on other uninteresting people. I can fix my own cup of coffee and not have to look at or talk to other people. No matter where I go, I stimulate others, and have been doing so all my life. It used to be I’d sometimes get stimulated back.
3. I think motherhood is the noblest task of all, because you cannot do it at your convenience, or tailor it to suit your preferences. You have to be ready to give up everything when you take on this task: your time, restful nights, your hobbies, your pursuit of physical fitness, any beauty you may have had, and all of the private little pleasures you might have counted as a right, from late dinners and long soaks in the tub to weekend excursions and cycling trips. I’m not saying you can’t have any of these things, but you have to be ready to let them all go if you’re going to have children and put them first.
4. Why do we feel sorry for people who can’t travel? Because, unable to expand externally, they are not able to expand internally either, they can’t multiply and so they are deprived of the possibility of undertaking expansive excursions in themselves and discovering who and what else they could have become.
5. I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.
6. A wee child toddling in a wonder world, I prefer to their dogma my excursions into the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing of flowers. If this is Paganism, then at present, at least, I am a Pagan.
7. How can you not love reading? It’s wonderful. An excursion, an adventure an escape from reality. She adored reading and had a hard time grasping anyone not loving it.
8. Yes, we had made and excursion into another world and we had come back, but we had brought the joy of life and of humanity back with us. In the rush and whirl of everyday things, we so often live alongside one another without making any mutual contact. We had learned on the North Fae of the Eiger that men are good, and the earth on which we were born is good.
9. The new dam, of course, will improve things. If ever filled it will back water to within sight of the Bridge, transforming what was formerly an adventure into a routine motorboat excursion. Those who see it then will not understand that half the beauty of Rainbow Bridge lay in its remoteness, its relative difficulty of access, and in the wilderness surrounding it, of which it was an integral part. When these aspects are removed the Bridge will be no more than an isolated geological oddity, an extension of that museum like diorama to which industrial tourism tends to reduce the natural world.
10. As an American, you make choices every day for others by supporting your government and its excursions or military actions into other countries. When you buy coffee at the same cafe every morning, you are choosing to support that business. When you pass judgment on the girl your brother starts to date, you affect his life. When you work for your boss, you choose to support him in his endeavors, as well as everyone else his business touches. You make choices for others every day. The difference is that now you are beginning to realize it. And now you are beginning to own it.
11. Don’t go off sightseeing. The real journey is right here. The great excursion starts from exactly where you are. You are the world. You have everything you need. You are the secret. You are the wide opened. Don’t look for the remedy for your troubles outside yourself. You are the medicine. You are the cure for your own sorrow.
12. All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figure.
13. Even the most exotic excursions can become tedious through repetition.
14. That is a generation’s difference these days, Ferdinand continued. A lifetime’s difference. A thousand years difference. What do you children understand of existence? You’re afraid even of your own feelings. You don’t write letters you telephone; you don’t dream you go for weekend excursions; you are rational in love and irrational in politics a pitiable race.
15. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert talks about this phenomenon in his 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness. The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, he writes. The frontal lobe the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens. This time travel into the future otherwise known as anticipation accounts for a big chunk of the happiness gleaned from any event. As you look forward to something good that is about to happen, you experience some of the same joy you would in the moment. The major difference is that the joy can last much longer. Consider that ritual of opening presents on Christmas morning. The reality of it seldom takes more than an hour, but the anticipation of seeing the presents under the tree can stretch out the joy for weeks. One study by several Dutch researchers, published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life in 2010, found that vacationers were happier than people who didn’t take holiday trips. That finding is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the timing of the happiness boost. It didn’t come after the vacations, with tourists bathing in their post-trip glow. It didn’t even come through that strongly during the trips, as the joy of travel mingled with the stress of travel: jet lag, stomach woes, and train conductors giving garbled instructions over the loudspeaker. The happiness boost came before the trips, stretching out for as much as two months beforehand as the holiday goers imagined their excursions. A vision of little umbrella-sporting drinks can create the happiness rush of a mini vacation even in the midst of a rainy commute. On some level, people instinctively know this. In one study that Gilbert writes about, people were told they’d won a free dinner at a fancy French restaurant. When asked when they’d like to schedule the dinner, most people didn’t want to head over right then. They wanted to wait, on average, over a week to savor the anticipation of their fine fare and to optimize their pleasure. The experiencing self seldom encounters pure bliss, but the anticipating self never has to go to the bathroom in the middle of a favorite band’s concert and is never cold from too much air conditioning in that theater showing the sequel to a favorite flick. Planning a few anchor events for a weekend guarantees you pleasure because even if all goes wrong in the moment you still will have derived some pleasure from the anticipation. I love spontaneity and embrace it when it happens, but I cannot bank my pleasure solely on it. If you wait until Saturday morning to make your plans for the weekend, you will spend a chunk of your Saturday working on such plans, rather than anticipating your fun. Hitting the weekend without a plan means you may not get to do what you want. You’ll use up energy in negotiations with other family members. You’ll start late and the museum will close when you’ve only been there an hour. Your favorite restaurant will be booked up and even if, miraculously, you score a table, think of how much more you would have enjoyed the last few days knowing that you’d be eating those seared scallops on Saturday night!
16. I had to have company,  I was made for it, I think so I made friends with the animals. They are just charming, and they have the kindest disposition and the politest ways; they never look sour, they never let you feel that you are intruding, they smile at you and wag their tail, if they’ve got one, and they are always ready for a romp or an excursion or anything you want to propose.
17. I grin, and he beams with pride. So what kind of hat is that? I ask, unable to resist. He’s adorable when he’s showing off his wardrobe like a puppy doing tricks. Although I remain cautious, knowing in the blink of an eye he can become a wolf again. My Peregrination Cap, he answers. Huh? His smile widens baring white teeth. Peregrination. An excursion a journey. So, why don’t you just call it your traveling cap? Then it wouldn’t be much of a conversation starter, would it? I raise an eyebrow. Um, the fact that it’s made of living moths might give you something to talk about. Morpheus laughs. For once our relationship feels comfortable, friendly.
18. The whole story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual.
19. The past week, Mother had denied her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and she’d taken it hard. Her market excursions were the acme of her days, and trying to commiserate, I’d said, I’m sorry, Handful, I know how you must feel. It seemed to me I did know what it felt to have one’s liberty curtailed, but she blazed up at me. So we just the same, me and you? That’s why you the one to shit in the pot and I’m the one to empty it.