Explorer Quotes

We were also fortunate enough to engage in our service a Canadian Frenchmen, who had been with the Chayenne Indians on the Black mountains, and last summer descended thence by the Little Missouri.

Meriwether Lewis

The advice I give to all adventurers is to seek a place where they may sleep
in safety.

Samuel de Champlain

No person who has not spent a period of his life in those 'stark and sullen solitudes that sentinel the Pole' will understand fully what trees and flowers, sun-flecked turf and running streams mean to the soul of a man

Ernest Shackleton

Situated, many hundred miles from our families in the howling wilderness, I believe few would have equally enjoyed the happiness we experienced. I often observed to my brother, You see now how little nature requires to be satisfied. Felicity, the companion of content, is rather found in our own breasts than in the enjoyment of external things; And I firmly believe it requires but a little philosophy to make a man happy in whatsoever state he is. This consists in a full resignation to the will of Providence; and a resigned soul finds pleasure in a path strewed with briars and thorns.

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.

A heavy fog this morning prevented our setting out before seven o'clock. At nine I took two men and walked on the L.S. I crossed three beautiful streams of running water heading into the prairies. On those streams the land very fine, covered with pea vine and rich weed.

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'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

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

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.

To be aroused in the dark by five feet of cold, green snake gliding over one's face is unpleasant.

David Livingstone

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

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

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

Robert Falcon Scott

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

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

With this lodging and diet our extreme toil in bearing and planting palisades so strained and bruised us and our continual labor in the extremity of the heat had so weakened us, as were cause sufficient to have made us as miserable in our native country or any other place in the world

John Smith (explorer)

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.

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

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

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

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

Had I permitted myself any innovation upon the original term, it would have been to convert it into Australia; as being more agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the earth.

Matthew Flinders

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

While as he yet doth breath extend, no man is blest; behold the end.

William Alexander