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

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.

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.

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

One feels ‘the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech’ in trying to describe things intangible.

I am in charge of my own spaceship. It’s my up, my down. I could choose to see this situation as a setback or a starting point.

The choice, as he saw it, was this: You give up or you work for change. What’s better for us? Barack called to the people gathered in the room. Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.

Early in my career, I had to choose between an honest arrogance and a hypercritical humility… I deliberately choose an honest arrogance, and I’ve never been sorry.

Perhaps its inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.

You find ways to adapt. If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice.

I prefer honest arrogance to hypocritical modesty.

I am the clue-finder, the web-cutter, the stinging fly. I was chosen for the lucky number.