After having dispatched a meal, I went ashore, and found no habitation save a single house, and that without an occupant; we had no doubt that the people had fled in terror at our approach, as the house was completely furnished.

I’m fascinated by musicians who don’t completely understand their territory; that’s when you do your best work.

When you go to the mountains, you see them and you admire them. In a sense, they give you a challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.

I’ve been here before and will come again, but I’m not going this trip through.

No one remembers who climbed Mount Everest the second time.

I enjoyed climbing with other people, good friends, but I did quite a lot of solo climbing, too.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

Truth is a pathless land.

My discovery that black holes emit radiation raised serious problems of consistency with the rest of physics. I have now resolved these problems, but the answer turned out to be not what I expected.

Children astound me with their inquisitive minds. The world is wide and mysterious to them, and as they piece together the puzzle of life, they ask ‚Why?‘ ceaselessly.

I have enjoyed great satisfaction from my climb of Everest and my trips to the poles. But there’s no doubt that my most worthwhile things have been the building of schools and medical clinics.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

I need more sex, OK? Before I die I wanna taste everyone in the world.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

Space is almost infinite. As a matter of fact, we think it is infinite.

Growing up in the place I did I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

However, because Britain is young and exciting, I did show my second line here once or twice.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

I want to work; then, as my kids get older, I want to have adventures. I want to visit all their countries: learn and live inside all their cultures.

We’ve climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it’s a valley of peace.

Tomorrow morning before we depart, I intend to land and see what can be found in the neighborhood.

Still round the corner there may wait, A new road or a secret gate.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

Today, we’re still loaded down – and, to some extent, embarrassed – by ancient myths, but we respect them as part of the same impulse that has led to the modern, scientific kind of myth. But we now have the opportunity to discover, for the first time, the way the universe is in fact constructed as opposed to how we would wish it to be constructed.

Adventure is worthwhile in itself.

While on top of Everest, I looked across the valley towards the great peak Makalu and mentally worked out a route about how it could be climbed. It showed me that even though I was standing on top of the world, it wasn’t the end of everything. I was still looking beyond to other interesting challenges.

We have one planet in our solar system that’s habitable, and that’s the Earth, and space travel can transform things back here for the better. First of all, by just having people go to space and look back on this fragile planet we live on. People have come back transformed and have done fantastic things.

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves – and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.

Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws, which otherwise would have been hidden from us forever.

I love to travel, but hate to arrive.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

Here ends my forever memorable first High Sierra excursion. I have crossed the Range of Light, surely the brightest and best of all the Lord has built. And, rejoicing in its glory, I gladly, gratefully, hopefully pray I may see it again.

I came to China to follow my star and to steep myself in the raw regions of the universe.

My desire was not to pass any island without taking possession, so that, one having been taken, the same may be said of all.

I think all documentaries leave out areas of people’s lives. Which is good. There are areas that need not be explored.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.

We are often raised as dependents then given over to teachers. It’s experience and exploration that can transform us and lead to mastery.

Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.

U2’s best work has always been when we didn’t know what we’re doing.

I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.

I think I mainly climb mountains because I get a great deal of enjoyment out of it. I never attempt to analyze these things too thoroughly, but I think that all mountaineers do get a great deal of satisfaction out of overcoming some challenge which they think is very difficult for them, or which perhaps may be a little dangerous.

I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible.

Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn’t that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I’d already been translating French poetry, I’d been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.

I had a project for my life which involved 10 years of wandering, then some years of medical studies and, if any time was left, the great adventure of physics.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

I’m not the sort of person who gives up on things. The first time we crossed the Atlantic in the balloon, it crashed, and we went on and did the Pacific. First time we crossed the Atlantic in a boat, it sank, and we went on and got the record. So, generally speaking, we will pick ourselves up, brush ourselves down, and carry on.

Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.

My message, especially to young people is to have courage to think differently, courage to invent, to travel the unexplored path, courage to discover the impossible and to conquer the problems and succeed. These are great qualities that they must work towards. This is my message to the young people.

The Congo was the most difficult shoot of my life but was also maybe the greatest adventure of my life.

Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.

I think the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles would revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.