“We had seen God in His splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.”

I chose life over death for myself and my friends. I believe it is in our nature to explore, to reach out into the unknown. The only true failure would be not to explore at all.

When things are easy, I hate it.

Optimism is the true moral courage.

Now my eyes are turned from the South to the North, and I want to lead one more Expedition. This will be the last to the North Pole.

Superhuman effort isn’t worth a damn unless it achieves results.

I have often marveled at the thin line which separates success from failure.

Optimism is true moral courage.

I do not know what ‘moss’ stands for in the proverb , but if it stood for useful knowledge… I gathered more moss by rolling than I ever did at school.

I thought you’d rather have a live donkey than a dead lion.

If you’re a leader, a fellow that other fellows look to, you’ve got to keep going.

The noise resembles the roar of heavy, distant surf. Standing on the stirring ice one can imagine it is disturbed by the breathing and tossing of a mighty giant below.

I called to the other men that the sky was clearing, and then a moment later I realized that what I had seen was not a rift in the clouds but the white crest of an enormous wave.

After months of want and hunger, we suddenly found ourselves able to have meals fit for the gods, and with appetites the gods might have envied.

From the sentimental point of view, it is the last great Polar journey that can be made.

By endurance we conquer.

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

Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ.

I don’t think any person has any special knowledge about what God has planned for me and you any more than me and you do.

When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God.

Look at all the stars. You look up and you think, ‘God made all this and he remembered to make a little speck like me’. It’s kind of flattering, really.

Do not contemplate on death; it is just an incident in life; contemplate on God, who is the master of all life.

May God prevent us from becoming “right-thinking men”-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police.

When you see God in everyone, then they see God in you.

Live your life in such a way that those who know you but don’t know God will come to know God because they know you.