Quotes by Adventurers

In my youth I loved climbing and scrambling up rocks and mountains: now I seldom intrude on the dweller of a second story, and my greatest enemy or friend may avoid me altogether on the third; so humbled is the aspiring spirit of my youth.
Edward John Trelawny
Yet as the days went by and the pains in my feet subsided, I began to look back on my little adventure with a hint of fondness. When it comes to memories, it seems we all have an editor within who will—if it’ll make for a good story—revise the senseless into symbols, or rephrase miseries into warm memories.
Ken Ilgunas
I guess we all feel we're in control and we are, until we're not. The problem is that seldom can we tell when it is that we step over the precipice of no return - and then for most of us it is to late.
Braam Malherbe
There is no such thing as a perfectly happy or perfectly unhappy man in the world. One has more happiness in his life and another more unhappiness, and the same circumstance may produce widely different effects on individuals of different temperaments.
Giacomo Casanova
From that moment our love became sad, and sadness is a disease which gives the death-blow to affection.
Giacomo Casanova
To me, my Christian faith is all about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened, and loved--yet somehow that message gets lost on most of us, and we tend only to remember the religious nutters or the God of endless school assemblies. This is no one's fault, it is just life. Our job is to stay open and gentle, so we can hear the knocking on the door of our heart when it comes. The irony is that I never meet anyone who doesn't want to be loved or held or forgiven. Yet I meet a lot of folk who hate religion. And I so sympathize. But so did Jesus. In fact, He didn't just sympathize, He went much further. It seems more like this Jesus came to destroy religion and to bring life.
Bear Grylls
Playing it safe might not have hurt anyone, but it wouldn’t have inspired many, either.
Alex Staniforth
The philosopher is a person who refuses no pleasures which do not produce greater sorrows, and who knows how to create new ones.
Giacomo Casanova
Love is a great poet its resources are inexhaustible but if the end it has in view is not obtained it feels weary and remains silent.
Giacomo Casanova
We have trains to hop, voyages to embark on, and rides to hitch. And then there’s the great American wild—vanishing but still there—ready to impart its wisdom from an Alaskan peak or a patch of grass growing in a crack of a city sidewalk. And no matter how much sprawl and civilization overtake our wilds, we’ll always have the boundless wildlands in ourselves to explore.
Ken Ilgunas
The man who seeks to educate himself must first read and then travel in order to correct what he has learned.
Giacomo Casanova
It is always easy to break one’s word to oneself.
Giacomo Casanova
I am a living soul dwelling on a planet that is afloat in a universe radiant with life. I feel so small and at the same time so uniquely privileged to partake in that inconceivable mystery.
Yossi Ghinsberg
Perhaps there’s no better act of simplification than climbing a mountain. For an afternoon, a day, or a week, it’s a way of reducing a complicated life into a simple goal. All you have to do is take one step at a time, place one foot in front of the other, and refuse to turn back until you’ve given everything you have.
Ken Ilgunas
Jim turned his head slowly to look into my eyes and shuddered. “It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to dying.
Susan Oakey-Baker
I had long believed adversity was the greatest teacher, but I learnt that nothing teaches you more about life than death.
Alex Staniforth
The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
Christopher McCandless
He is smitten on the brain, -he reads and writes verses! I caught him in the act! Fools might say he was inspired; but I know it is the first and worst symptom of lunacy. All other maniacs have lucid intervals; some are curable; but the madness of poets, dogs, and musicians, is past hope. Earth possesses no remedy, science no cure.
Edward John Trelawny
My dad had once told me a definition of faith and I had not forgotten it: 'Faith is to believe something you do not see. The result of that faith is to see what you believed'.
Braam Malherbe
Let me, however, although no verbal critic, protest against the profanation of the word friend. In this my history I must be honest, make a distinction between the oriental diamond and its worthless imitation of paste, and separate the grain from the chaff — gossamer words, that weigh nothing, from substantial realities heavier than gold.
Edward John Trelawny
For brick and mortar breed filth and crime,With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats;And men are whithered before their primeBy the curse paved in with the lanes and streets.And lungs are poisoned and shoulders bowed, In the smothering reek of mill and mine;And death stalks in on the struggling crowd—But he shuns the shadow of the oak and pine
George Washington Sears
The story of John Ritter illustrates what it means to be a hero and how we treat our heroes. When we idealize real people they lose their humanity. They are turned into idols that we worship and may later want to destroy. Heroes are transformed from conscious-feeling fellow homo sapiens into characters in our stories. The greatest hero-characters will become legends or even mythic characters. We might think we know them, but when they are idolized they become more like treasured memories, existing in our minds as archetypal characters, rather than living-breathing human beings with thoughts and feelings of their own.
Jeff Rasley
Once you know you are worthy and your story is worthy, you fight for other stories.
Jedidiah Jenkins
On a hike, the days pass with the wind, the sun, the stars; movement is powered by a belly full of food and water, not a noxious tankful of fossil fuels. On a hike, you're less a job title and more a human being....A periodic hike not only stretches the limbs but also reminds us: Wow, there's a big old world out there.
Ken Ilgunas
Adventure should be 80 percent 'I think this is manageable,' but it's good to have that last 20 percent where you're right outside your comfort zone. Still safe, but outside your comfort zone.
Bear Grylls
I wonder what Thoreau would have done...[H}is greatest story, I thought, was his life. He knew that anything is possible when you wield the pen and claim your life as your own. But the truth is so few have the privilege to write their own stories. People are born into poverty without a hope of redemption. Children are abused and damaged. Disease and war and famine and a million other things prevent them from wielding the pen. But for those of us who can, should it not be our great privilege to live the lives we've imagined? To be who we want to be? To go on our own great journeys and share our experiences with others?
Ken Ilgunas
O I will accompany the windUntil the chainOf my white bonesDrifts like fine sandAnd I become compassing.I become the
John Fairfax
So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.
Christopher Johnson McCandless
I didn’t say a word. He wouldn’t be using oxygen. K2 is more dangerous than Everest.
Susan Oakey-Baker
Life, to me, is like fishing: you won’t catch anything until you start, and every year you get older is another year the fish might slip through the net.
Alex Staniforth
My commitment is to urge us all toward moderation and good will toward fellow citizens. If we can set aside unworthy emotions that deepen our political divide, concentrate on finding solutions to the problems our country and communities face, we can then work toward a brighter future with less rancor but firm in our purpose. Or, we can feed our primitive fight or flight impulse by lashing out in social media and then duck into our silos. If we do that, the unhealthy polarization of the time of Trump will get even worse.
Jeff Rasley
To lead a blameless life you must curb your passions , and whatever misfortune may befall you cannot be ascribed by anyone to want of good luck, or attributed to fate; these words are devoid of sense, and all fault will rightly fall on your own head.
Giacomo Casanova
Hope is nothing but a deceitful flatterer accepted by reason only because it is often in need of palliatives.
Giacomo Casanova
Happiness only real when shared.
Christopher McCandless
Mountaineers are one of the few groups to celebrate before the finish line. More mountaineers die on the descent than on the ascent.
Susan Oakey-Baker
N'ayez jamais peur de la vie, n'ayez jamais peur de l'aventure, faites confiance au hasard, à la chance, à la destinée. Partez, allez conquérir d'autres espaces, d'autres espérances. Le reste vous sera donné de surcroît.
Henry de Monfreid
lies, truth, loveI have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of it's charms.
Giacomo Casanova
... But these skeptics are only selectively skeptical. They think themselves enlightened for resisting all this new proof and remaining steadfast in mistrusting anything that someone else says. But it is a false enlightenment to accept only those ideas that align with one's worldview and reject those that don't.
Ken Ilgunas
Happy are those lovers who when their senses require rest can fall back upon the intellectual enjoyments afforded by the mind! Sweet sleep then comes and lasts until the body has recovered its general harmony. On awaking the senses are again active and always ready to resume their action.
Giacomo Casanova
Love becomes imprudent only when it is impatient to enjoy; but when it is a matter of procuring the return of a happiness to which a baleful combination of circumstances has raised impediments, love sees and foresees all that the most subtle perspicacity can discover.
Giacomo Casanova
Circumstance has no value. It is how one relates to a situation that has value. All true meaning resides the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you.
Christopher McCandless
I just have to make it to the Tuichi' I mumbled to myself, 'I just have to make it to the Tuichi'.Alone, deep in the jungle, so small and insignificant, pitted against nature, still I sensed someone was watching me. Or watching over me.Someone could see me, someone was providing for me
Yossi Ghinsberg
And then came the three-toed sloth. Stupid sloth. It was a crazy-looking beastie, all arms and bristling grey fur; its body was a blob, the kind of shape a six-year-old would draw for a pig, and its face was flattened like a racoon that had run full tilt into a brick wall. A triangular stub of a nose jutted out at an angle beneath a fringe that must have been difficult to see through. In fact, from side-on it looked disturbingly like John Lennon.
Tony James Slater
There is little faith involved in setting out on a journey where the destination is certain and every step in between has been mapped in detail. Bravery, trust, is about leaving camp in the dark, when we do not know the route ahead and cannot be certain we will ever return.
Bear Grylls
We ourselve are the authors of almost all our woes and griefs, of which we so unreasonably complain.
Giacomo Casanova
Many great people over the centuries have depended on their faith- it is a sign of great strength to need Jesus in your life.
Bear Grylls
Wouldn't it be better to die doing something interesting than to drop dead in an office and the last thing you see is someone you don't like?
Barbara Hillary
I have never done anything in my life except try to make myself ill when I had my health and try to make myself well when I had lost it. I have been equally and thoroughly successful in both, and today in that particular I enjoy perfect health, which I wish I could ruin again; but age prevents me.
Giacomo Casanova
Enjoy the present, bid defiance to the future, laugh at all those reasonable beings who exercise their reason to avoid the misfortunes which they fear, destroying at the same time the pleasure that they might enjoy.
Giacomo Casanova
You can't become a decent horseman until you fall off and get up again, a good number of times. There's life in a nutshell.
Bear Grylls
Desires are but pain and torment, and enjoyment is sweet because it delivers us from them.
Giacomo Casanova
Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.--Alexander Supertramp, May 1992
Christopher McCandless
My Everest is not your Everest. Your Everest is not mine. We all have an Everest. Each of us. Sometimes the peak is literally Mount Everest but most times it lies deep within us, figuratively occupying a mountainous inner space. It calls us to rise up, to do what we formerly labeled as impossible, and to be who we deeply and desperately want to be. I know that I have found an Everest when my soul furiously pokes me repeatedly until I listen. Heeding this call to passionate adventure of any sort initiates a journey of intense immense proportion that changes every molecule of my being.
T.A. Loeffler
What do you want to say to me?’‘Nothing—just to talk about the profession I am entering. I am about to practice virtue in order to find a man who loves it only to destroy it' [replied Mademoiselle Vesian.]‘That is it exactly; and believe me, everything in this life is much the same. We refer everything to ourselves, and each of us is a tyrant. That is why the best of mortals is he who is tolerant.
Giacomo Casanova
Emotion has its place, but it must not interfere with taking the appropriate action.
Susan Oakey-Baker
I am one whose faith is, that love and friendship, with ardent natures, are like those trees of the torrid zone which yield fruit but once, and then die.
Edward John Trelawny
You are only given one life, one chance at fully living it...take risks, believe in your dreams, explore the world and her people, live out loud!
Danell Lynn
Like everyone, I have my challenges—but they sure don’t have me.
Alex Staniforth
My own experiences in the wild rank in value just behind the birth of my children, my wedding, and the memorial services and graduations I’ve attended. I am permanently affected by those solitary encounters with land, sky, and water, and all that’s contained within. I don’t really know if I am a better person because of them, but I am happier for them." Letters, The American Scholar, Autumn 2016
Jeff Rasley
Like a great fool, I went ashore with them, and they gave me some cursed stuff they called gin, - such blasphemy I never heard! At first when they told me they had set up a great distillery of gin, I thought them very useful, clever, good men; for you know, captain, any nation might be converted by hollands; -but this was the unchristianest beastliest liquor I ever tasted, and it made me - as I feel now. Yet the foolish, idiot-people of the island think it very good, because it makes them mad-drunk, and they believe Heaven sent it; but it made me believe the devil had got amongst them.
Edward John Trelawny