Echoes

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

No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.

Never did I think so much, never did I realize my own existence so much, never was I so much alive, so much myself, as in those journeys which I made alone and on foot.

Do not follow in the footsteps of the old masters, but seek what they sought — and find it in the mountains, the rivers, and the open sky.

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.

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.

My soul, my soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there? I have returned, here I am again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you again, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you anew. Shall I tell you everything I have seen, experienced, and drunk in? Or do you not want to hear about all the noise of life and the world? But one thing you must know, the one thing I have learned is that one must live this life. This life is the way, the long sought-after way to the unfathomable, which we call "divine". There is no other way. All other ways are false paths.

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

Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself.

Come forth into the light of things, let Nature be your teacher.

People often say that I'm curious about too many things at once. But can you really forbid a man from harboring a desire to know and embrace everything that surrounds him?

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.

And you? When will you begin that long journey into yourself?

The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.

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 explorers of the past were great men and we should honour them. But let us not forget that their spirit lives on. It is still not hard to find a man who will adventure for the sake of a dream or one who will search, for the pleasure of searching, not for what he may find.

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.

He who cannot find himself the retreat of his own soul, let him appeal to solitude — if he can even bear himself.

In prosecuting these discoveries, the dangers we are exposed to are obvious, but I rejoice that we are chosen to confront them.

The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves—without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster. We cannot begin with an entirely clean slate, since we arrive at this problem with predispositions of hereditary and environmental origin; but, after understanding such built-in biases, is it not possible to pry insights from nature?

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

I set out alone, having neither fellow-traveller in whose companionship I might find cheer, nor caravan whose party I might join, but swayed by an overmastering impulse within me and a desire long-cherished in my bosom to visit these illustrious sanctuaries.

... I came fortunately upon Darwin’s and Spencer’s works “The Data of Ethics,” “First Principles,” “Social Statics,” “The Descent of Man.” Reaching the pages which explain how man has absorbed such mental foods as were favorable to him, retaining what was salutary, rejecting what was deleterious, I remember that light came as in a flood and all was clear. Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution. "All is well since all grows better” became my motto, my true source of comfort. Man was not created with an instinct for his own degradation, but from the lower he had risen to the higher forms. Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection. His face is turned to the light; he stands in the sun and looks upward.