I am not solicitous to examine particularly everything here, which indeed could not be done in fifty years, because my desire is to make all possible discoveries, and return to your Highnesses, if it please our Lord, in April.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

For me, I don’t want to cheat the game by saying, or kind of doing lip service by saying, I want to be the greatest ever. I want to be able to show it.

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

I think, because I started Virgin when I was a teenager, it has become a part of me, like my family, and I am motivated by ambition for it, almost as if it were a child.

I don’t like Los Angeles. The people are awful and terribly shallow, and everybody wants to be famous but nobody wants to play the game. I’m from New York. I will kill to get what I need.

In the theatre, people talk. Talk, talk until the cows come home about journeys of discovery and about what Hazlitt thought of a line of Shakespeare. I can’t stand it.

You’d have a hard time finding anything better than Barcelona for food, as far as being a hub. Given a choice between Barcelona and San Sebastian to die in, I’d probably want to die in San Sebastian.

Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

Man, I really like Vegas.

If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be reached by search or trail.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

I am proud to have been born in Iowa. Through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy, it was a place of adventure and daily discoveries – the wonder of the growing crops, the excitements of the harvest, the journeys to the woods for nuts and hunting, the joys of snowy winters, the comfort of the family fireside, of good food and tender care.

I didn’t consider myself a fashion designer at all at the time of punk. I was just using fashion as a way to express my resistance and to be rebellious. I came from the country, and by the time I got to London, I considered myself to be very stupid. It was my ambition to understand the world I live in.

Instead of being concerned that you have no office, be concerned to think how you may fit yourself for office. Instead of being concerned that you are not known, seek to be worthy of being known.

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.

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

The glamour of it all! New York! America!

When exploring London, you will come across lots of excitement by chance, so try to take everything in rather than just rushing around to all of the major tourist haunts.

And I wound up in New Orleans for all those years and it was a great place, really a catalyst creatively.

Hawaii is paradise. It sounds cheesy to say it, but there’s music in the air there.

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.

I’m trying to get to Mars before everyone else.

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.

I identify myself as a hustler since I was a young kid.

Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature’s forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.

I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.

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.

Expect me to continue what I’ve been doing, which is trying to take over the world.

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

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

The more nobly a man wills and acts, the more avid he becomes for great and sublime aims to pursue. He will no longer be content with family, country, and the remunerative aspect of his work. He will want wider organisations to create, new paths to blaze, causes to uphold, truths to discover, an ideal to cherish and defend.

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.

I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, you do not feel overwhelmed by a residue of grievance and hate.

Any East Coast road trip we have is very exciting, just being on the road, taking it all in.

There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.

Steak and Shake in Indianapolis is definitely the first stop when we hit that city.

I was scared many times on Everest, but this is all part of the challenge. When I fell down a crevasse, it was pretty scary.

Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it.

I love Africa, and Ulusaba, our home in South Africa, is pretty special. It’s on a rocky hill overlooking the bush, and from your room, you can see lions stalking zebras by the waterhole.

I’m a wandering gypsy.

Paris ain’t much of a town.

I always thought that if I made it big or got successful at what I had started out to do, that I wanted to come back to my part of the country and do something great, something that would bring a lot of jobs into this area.

Just as I wanted to outdo everyone when I played, I had to outdo everyone when we were out on the town.

My experiences in life are getting bigger and better. The more stuff I do, the more stuff I talk about – having kids, traveling, going through relationship problems, dealing with things in my own family. All that stuff builds character.

I have a personal ambition to live my life honestly and honor the true love that I’ve had and also the people I’ve had around me.

Anyone who doesn’t have a great time in San Francisco is pretty much dead to me.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

When good Americans die they go to Paris.

Just got back from a pleasure trip: I took my mother-in-law to the airport.

When I was a little girl, I always dreamed of being a star. I didn’t really know what all that meant. I didn’t know.

I’m not an ambitious person, there is no ambition in my life. I have a mission in my life. And my mission is to serve my country. And when I am working for my state, it means I am working for my country, or my nation.

People want to go out and travel around and meet cool people. I could just go live in Vermont, but is that what I really want?

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels.

When I have been travelling around to speak in different countries, I am always offered help to write about the specific climate policies in specific countries. But that is not really necessary. Because the basic problem is the same everywhere.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.