“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.”

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.

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.

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.

The importance of a journey is not measured by the distance covered, but by the destination reached.

These ‘messengers’ will not be hindered from accomplishing at their best speed the distance which they have to go, either by snow, or rain, or heat, or by the darkness of night.

Once we decide we have to do something, we can go miles ahead.

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.

A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

What pains me is that we are having a long distance relationship without a long distance.

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.