“If I had not some strength of will I would make a first class drunkard.”

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

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

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

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

I seemed to vow to myself that some day I would go to the region of ice and snow and go on and on till I came to one of the poles of the earth, the end of the axis upon which this great round ball turns.

Difficulties are just things to overcome after all.

Teachers should be very careful not to spoil their pupils’ taste for poetry for all time by making it a task and an imposition.

The cynic puts all human actions into two classes – openly bad and secretly bad.

Growing up in a particular neighborhood, growing up in a working-class family, not having much money, all of those things fire you and can give you an edge, can give you an anger.

The best classroom in the world is at the feet of an elderly person.

I’ve got more class than most.

I’ve learned, That money doesn’t buy class.

Some of the aspects of my speaking style are inherited and come naturally to me. I didn’t take classes, and I didn’t do anything to hone my skills.

To find love in Paris you must go down among those classes where the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle for bare necessities, have allowed more energy to survive.

The privileged classes today are bothered about petrol and diesel prices while the poor can’t afford two meals a day. I am a very small person, but I want us to think beyond personal and regional interests.