The quote database

Life is a stern business in any case: why pretend that it is anything else?

Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.

Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion.

If you are a brave man you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery.

If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.

More than once in my short life I have been struck by the value of the man who is blind to what appears to be a common-sense certainty: he achieves the impossible.

Antarctic exploration is seldom as bad as you imagine, seldom as bad as it sounds.

What pulled Scott through was character, sheer good grain, which ran over and under and through his weaker self and clamped it together.

Somehow in judging polar life you must discount compulsory endurance; and find out what a man can shirk, remembering always that it is a sledging life which is the hardest test.

It is because it is so much easier to shirk in civilization that it is difficult to get a standard of what your average man can do.

Such extremity of suffering cannot be measured: madness or death may give relief.

There is no doubt that a blizzard has a bewildering and numbing effect upon the brain of any one exposed to it.

His capacity for work was prodigious, and when his own work happened to take less than his full time he characteristically found activity in serving a scientist or exercising an animal.

There were times when his optimism appeared forced and formal though I believe it was not really so: there were times when I have almost hated him for his infernal cheerfulness.