British Explorer Quotes

James Cook

Robert Falcon Scott

Arthur C. Clarke

John Hanning Speke

William Dampier

George Mallory

Francis Younghusband

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

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

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

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

We found shoal water, where we smelt so sweet and so strong a smell, as if we had been in the midst of some delicate garden abounding with all kinds of odoriferous flowers, by which we were assured that the land could not be far distant.

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.

The world is apt to judge of everything by the success; and whoever has ill fortune will hardly be allowed a good name.

William Dampier

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

Remember, the greater the opportunity, the fewer are those who see it.

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.

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.

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

Gradually, very gradually, we saw the great mountain sides and glaciers and aretes, now one fragment and now another through the floating rifts, until far higher in the sky than imagination had dared to suggest the white summit of Everest appeared.

If we strike a line to the N.W. from Sydney to Wellington Valley, we shall find that little change takes place in the geological features of the country.

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.

Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard

I fear we have shot our bolt - but we have been to Pole and done the longest journey on record.

Robert Falcon Scott

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