Loneliness is the penalty of leadership, but the man who has to make the decisions is assisted greatly if he feels that there is no uncertainty in the minds of those who follow him, and that his orders will be carried out confidently and in the expectation of success.

If I had not some strength of will I would make a first class drunkard.

We had seen God in His splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.

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

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.

Now my eyes are turned from the South to the North, and I want to lead one more Expedition. This will be the last... to the North Pole.

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