44 Quotes by Ernest Shackleton

Life to me is the greatest of all games. The danger lies in treating it as a trivial game, a game to be taken lightly, and a game in which the rules don't matter much. The rules matter a great deal. The game has to be played fairly or it is no game at all. And even to win the game is not the chief end. The chief end is to win it honorably and splendidly.

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

Men Wanted for Dangerous Expedition: Low Wages for Long Hours of Arduous Labour under Brutal Conditions; Months of Continual Darkness and Extreme Cold; Great Risk to Life and Limb from Disease, Accidents and Other Hazards; Small Chance of Fame in Case of Success.

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.

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

Superhuman effort isn’t worth a damn unless it achieves results.

No person who has not spent a period of his life in those ‘stark and sullen solitudes that sentinel the Pole’ will understand fully what trees and flowers, sun-flecked turf and running streams mean to the soul of a man.

I thought you’d rather have a live donkey than a dead lion.

One feels ‘the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech’ in trying to describe things intangible.