Ever since the morning of May 29, 1953, when Tenzing Norgay and I became the first climbers to step onto the summit of Mount Everest, I’ve been called a great adventurer.

Be more dedicated to making solid achievements than in running after swift but synthetic happiness.

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

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

I’ve been everywhere in the world, seen everything, had everything a man can have.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail. Reasons the card, but passion the gale.

Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn’t even nothing or once.

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.

Even though I had won in other categories, I didn’t have any expectations when I came into F1. Qualifying fifth, finishing sixth? I didn’t expect it.

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

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.

Never lose a holy curiosity.

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.

Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals.

I doubt anyone else would have travelled as extensively as I have to meet the citizens of the country.

NATO’s brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind.

Going to Southeast Asia for the first time and tasting that spectrum of flavors – that certainly changed my whole palate, the kind of foods I crave. A lot of the dishes I used to love became boring to me.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

I love to travel, but hate to arrive.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

I made an album I’m very proud of, and that’s about it.

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated – Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example.

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

The great thing about America is that you can come from the worst circumstances and become something remarkable.

The facts tell us that no religious Faith releases – or ever has released at any moment in History – a higher degree of warmth, a more intense dynamism of unification than the Christianity of our own day – and the more Catholic it is, the truer my words.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they’d both unite against an invasion from Mars.

The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.

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.

The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.

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

Would I swap what I have achieved as a cook if I could have been as successful as a footballer? Definitely.

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

It’s useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.

Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.

I really haven’t liked the commercialization of mountaineering, particularly of Mt. Everest. By paying $65,000, you can be conducted to the summit by a couple of good guides.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, in the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force, in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts. And so it was that they soon understood us, and we them, either by speech or by signs, and they have been very serviceable.

Every President I think I’ve ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn’t quite get done what they wanted done. And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

Being acknowledged for your work is always a great accomplishment, whether it’s people in my city, kids in the street, all the way up to the Grammys.

I was 18 years old, and it was a dream come true for me to work out and eat great food for free. What else do you want in life? People think that is what it is like to be in a SEAL team, but it is less than a fraction of your career as a real SEAL.

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

I think the FBI is the premier law enforcement agency in all of human history.

World War II broke out in 1939, and many people credit that war with saving the economy.

Applause waits on success.

For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.

Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs… I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it would consume me whole.

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

Excellence is a continuous process and not an accident.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.