19th-century Explorer Quotes

Roald Amundsen

Fridtjof Nansen

Ernest Shackleton

Robert Falcon Scott

David Livingstone

Robert Peary

Charles de Foucauld

I was in Deadwood at the time and on hearing of the killing made my way at once to the scene of the shooting and found that my friend had been killed by McCall.

One must never look for happiness. One meets it by the way — but it is always going in the opposite direction.

Isabelle Eberhardt

In the Reggio Emilia preschools, however, each child is viewed as infinitely capable, creative, and intelligent. The job of the teacher is to support these qualities and to challenge children in appropriate ways so that they develop fully.

Louise Arner Boyd

The expedition had now performed its functions. I saw that old father Nile without any doubt rises in the Victoria Nyanza, and as I had foretold, that lake is the great source of the holy river which cradled the first expounder of our religious belief.

John Hanning Speke

Not until, years later, I found my true interest in life did I discover that I could master a subject, no matter how difficult, if it helped me in what I wanted to do.

Lincoln Ellsworth

What great faith our Lord Jesus Christ asks of us - and how just that is. Do we not owe him such faith? It looks impossible to us, but Jesus is Master of the impossible.

Charles de Foucauld

Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman, Captain L. E. G. Oates of the Inniskilling Dragoons. In March 1912, returning from the Pole, he walked willingly to his death in a blizzard to try and save his comrades, beset by hardships.

It is a curious fact that camels walk more quickly and straighter to the sound of singing.

If I wished to express the basic principle of my ideas in a somewhat strongly worded sentence, I would say that man, in his bodily development, is a primate fetus that has become sexually mature

Melbourne is wonderfully altered since I last saw it. There are some very fair buildings in it now, and things are a little cheaper than they used to be.

William John Wills

You are all fools and old women; come with me, if any of you are brave enough, and I will show you how to fight.

James Beckwourth

The Mystery of Nature only serves to draw us on. We cannot Resist. But then comes our reward. The deeper we penetrate the higher is our exaltation. Those who pierce farthest into the mystery of Nature enjoy the purst delight. So on and on we have to go - layman and scientist alike. And we shall never stop. The lure is too great.

Francis Younghusband

Victory awaits him, who has everything in order - luck we call it. Defeat is definitely due for him, who has neglected to take the necessary precautions - bad luck we call it

First of all, a scientist must be endowed with an imagination, for imagination plays no less important a part in science than it does in art. Imagination is as necessary as is painstaking work on collected material. Without imagination scientific work is just an assortment of facts and conclusions — empty, chaotic, and often barren.

Alexander Fersman

I think I'm the first man to sit on top of the world.

The termites, ever hard at work, were reconstructing their habitations. Strange Arachnidios, such as the silkweaving spider, ma-vuvi (Nephita bragantina) were swinging from spray to spray, fastening them together with their delicate yellow webs. The active and obscure Xylophages were mining to the very heart the knotted trunks of ancient trees.

Sweet flower of the golden horn, Thy beauty passeth praise! But why should spring thy gold adorn Most meet for summer days?

Henry Hurd Rusby

There's places in Africa where you get visions of primeval force... in Africa the Past has hardly stopped breathing.

The limits of the unknown had to recede step by step before the ever-increasing yearning after light and knowledge of the human mind.

Fridtjof Nansen

The most striking contradiction of our civilization is the fundamental reverence for truth which we profess and the thorough-going disregard for it which we practice.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson

There is nothing truly serious in life. All words sound hollow when one listens to them carefully.

Alexandra David-Néel

Anyhow, a philosophical turn of thought now was not amiss, else one's patience would have given out almost at the harbour entrance. The term of her probation was eight days.

Ambas and Bobia Islands are perfect gems of beauty. Mondoleh I cannot say I admire. It always looks to me exactly like one of those flower-stands full of ferns and plants - the sort you come across in drawing rooms at home, with wire-work legs. I do not mean that Mondoleh has wire-work legs under water, but it looks as if it might have.

Iceland, though it lies so far to the north that it is partly within the Arctic Circle, is, like Norway, Scotland, and Ireland, affected by the Gulf Stream, so that considerable portions of it are quite habitable.

I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one's life and sigh.