I should like to save the Shire, if I could – though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.

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 love trying new things.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

I would like to fly in space. Absolutely. That would be cool. I used to just do personally risky things, but now I’ve got kids and responsibilities, so I can’t be my own test pilot. That wouldn’t be a good idea. But I definitely want to fly as soon as it’s a sensible thing to do.

I’m a wandering gypsy.

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

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

The outpouring of support from millions of people in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti has been impressive.

I’m someone who likes plowing new ground, then walking away from it. I get bored easily. For me, the big thrill comes with the discovering.

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.

When you are younger, you want to do everything, and you go haywire.

Adventures are to the adventurous.

Juvenile crime is not naturally born in the boy, but is largely due either to the spirit of adventure that is in him, to his own stupidity, or to his lack of discipline, according to the nature of the individual.

I have always loved blizzards, if only because of the driving experience – which is definitely an acquired taste.

Hearing voices no one else can hear isn’t a good sign, even in the wizarding world.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket – half a million dollars. It can be done.

The mountains are calling and I must go.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

I have wanted to fly into space for many years, but never imagined it would really be feasible.

I like the idea of making a big, fun, adventure type of movie.

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.

Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.

I got to Africa. I got the opportunity to go and learn, not about any animal, but chimpanzees. I was living in my dream world, the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It was Tanganyika when I began.

If you had your life to live over again, do it overseas.

On the summit of Everest, I had a feeling of great satisfaction to be first there.

To be able to travel the world, especially to places I never thought I’d be… it’s really, you know, still fascinating for me.

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.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

Listen; there’s a hell of a good universe next door: let’s go.

We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.

Despite all I have seen and experienced, I still get the same simple thrill out of glimpsing a tiny patch of snow in a high mountain gully and feel the same urge to climb towards it.

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

Life is an adventure, it’s not a package tour.

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.

My favorite mode of transport is hot-air ballooning. It’s so graceful to be blown by the wind, to go where the wind takes you.

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

Most of my short stories are fantasy.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

Live dangerously and you live right.

Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

Perhaps one day I will go into space.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

I like Aurora, ‚Sleeping Beauty,‘ because she’s just sleeping and looking pretty and waiting for boys to come kiss her. Sounds like a good life – lots of naps and cute boys fighting dragons to come kiss you.

The truth is you don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. Life is a crazy ride, and nothing is guaranteed.

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

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

The balloons only have one life and the only way of finding out whether they work is to attempt to fly around the world.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

I love to travel, but hate to arrive.

It’s not a real adventure when you have to pay for it.

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.

‚Discworld‘ is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.

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.

To the lover of wilderness, Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.