Ernest Shackleton Quotes

“By endurance we conquer.”

“Difficulties are just things to overcome, after all.”

“Optimism is true moral courage.”

“If you're a leader, a fellow that other fellows look to, you've got to keep going.”

“I have often marveled at the thin line which separates success from failure.”

“To be brave cheerily, to be patient with a glad heart, to stand the agonies of thirst with laughter and song, to walk beside death for months and never be sad – that's the spirit that makes courage worth having.”

“I chose life over death for myself and my friends... I believe it is in our nature to explore, to reach out into the unknown. The only true failure would be not to explore at all.”

“I thought you would prefer a live donkey to a dead lion.”

“At 5 p.m. she went down. The stern was the last to go under water. I cannot write about it.”

“What got the James Caird to South Georgia was a combination of luck and skill. The skill was Worsley's, this brilliant navigator, this wonderful small boat handler. But there is always the element of luck. Shackleton was a lucky man. He was lucky.”

“Though we have been compelled to abandon the ship, which is crushed beyond all hope, we are alive and have stores and equipment for the task that lies before us... I pray God I can manage to get the whole party to civilization.”

“We were a tiny speck in the vast vista of the sea. The forces arrayed against us would be almost overwhelming.”

“I find a difficulty in settling down to write... A wonderful evening. In the darkening twilight I saw a lone star hover, gem-like, above the bay.”

“It seemed to me that among his achievements, great as they were, his one failure was the most glorious.”

“We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down, yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole. We had seen God in His splendors, heard the text that nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.”