20th-century Explorer Quotes

Edmund Hillary

Arthur C. Clarke

Tenzing Norgay

Reinhold Messner

Wilfred Thesiger

Ranulph Fiennes

Anatoli Boukreev

So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

Christopher McCandless

They taught me that all life forms are important to each other in our common quest for happiness and survival. That there is more to life than just yourself, your own family, or your own kind.

Lawrence Anthony

There is scarce a cave, an isolated rock, a lone pine tree or a pile of stones without supporting folklore.

On winning in the face of obstacles:

Motivation, teamwork, leadership, patience, constantly looking over you shoulders at the rivals and never over-stretching yourself.

Ranulph Fiennes

I knew instinctively that it was the very hardness of life in the desert which drew me back there - it was the same pull which takes men back to the polar ice, to high mountains, and to the sea.

Wilfred Thesiger

My mountain did not seem to me a lifeless thing of rock and ice, but warm and friendly and living. She was a mother hen, and the other mountains were chicks under her wings.

On Everest

Though my father was a sirdar, he always carried loads. It is hard for someone who is walking unburdened to generate in others an enthusiasm for work.

Jamling Tenzing Norgay

In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits.

Reinhold Messner

My real log is written in the sea and sky; the sails talking with the rain and the stars amid the sounds of the sea, the silences full of secret things between my boat and me, like the times I spent as a child listening to the forest talk.

Bernard Moitessier

There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a yeti.

Every victory of man over man has in itself a taste of defeat.... There is no essential difference between the various human groups, creatures whose bones and brains and members are the same; and every damage we do there is a form of mutilation, as if the fingers of the left hand were to be cut off by the right.

The true secret to seeking the unknown is in the looking, not the finding. The journey is what matters.

Few mountains have such a superb array of ridges and faces.

I could be accused of being a wannabe tribesman, of wanting to be a tribal dude, but that is not how I see it. I see it as me doing what they wanted me to do, showing them respect and hanging out with them.

When there is no one to remind you what society's rules are, and there is nothing to keep you linked to that society, you had better be prepared for some startling changes.

Big mountains are a completely different world: snow, ice, rocks, sky, and thin air. You cannot conquer them, only rise to their height for a short time; and for that they demand a great deal. The struggle is not with the enemy, or a competitor like in sports, but with yourself, with the feelings of weakness and inadequacy. That struggle appeals to me. It is why I became a mountaineer.

Anatoli Boukreev

There's a passage about 'rivers of molten rock that wound their way... until they cooled and lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented earth.' That's a perfect description: how did Tolkien know, a quarter century before anyone ever saw a picture of Io? Talk about Nature imitating Art.

Arthur C. Clarke