Echoes

Life is a journey, not a destination.

But do not ask me where I am going, As I travel in this limitless world, Where every step I take is my home.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend.

Ah! there is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.

He who lives sees much. He who travels sees more.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement and success have no meaning.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

Home is where the heart is.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.

I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

The purpose of life...is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

The person who has lived the most is not the one who has lived the longest, but the one with the richest experiences.

You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.

In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

To study the meaning of man and of life — I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.

I have arrived. I am home. In the here, in the now. I am solid. I am free. In the ultimate I dwell.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

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.

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In stopping to think through the meaning of what I have learned, there is much that I believe intensely, much I am unsure of. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

At the bottom of the fall we were able to stand again on dry land. The rope could not be recovered. We had flung down the adze from the top of the fall and also the logbook and the cooker wrapped in one of our blouses. That was all, except our wet clothes, that we brought out of the Antarctic, which we had entered a year and a half before with well-found ship, full equipment, and high hopes. That was all of tangible things; but in memories we were rich. 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 splendours, heard the text that Nature renders." We had reached the naked soul of man.