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Fridtjof Nansen Quotes

Total quotes: 16
“The continuous mutual abuse of groups holding differing views, which we witness in the newspapers, will certainly never lead to progress. Abuse convinces no one; it only degrades and brutalizes the abuser. Lies and unjust accusations achieve still less; they often finally boomerang on those who originate them.”
— Fridtjof Nansen
Tagged: Political Polarization, Newspapers, Abuse, Lies
“No future, however, can be built on despair, distrust, hatred, and envy.”
— Fridtjof Nansen
Tagged: Future, Despair, Distrust, Hatred, Envy
“When one has stood face to face with famine, with death by starvation itself, then surely one should have had one's eyes opened to the full extent of this misfortune. When one has beheld the great beseeching eyes in the starved faces of children staring hopelessly into the fading daylight, the eyes of agonized mothers while they press their dying children to their empty breasts in silent despair, and the ghostlike men lying exhausted on mats on cabin floors, with only the merciful release of death to wait for, then surely one must understand where all this is leading, understand a little of the true nature of the question. This is not the struggle for power, but a single and terrible accusation against those who still do not want to see, a single great prayer for a drop of mercy to give men a chance to live.”
— Fridtjof Nansen
Tagged: Famine, Starvation, War, World War I, Mercy, Death
“We can no longer look to traditional leadership for any hope of salvation. We have of late experienced one diplomatic and political congress after another; has any one of these brought the solution any nearer?”
— Fridtjof Nansen
Tagged: Salvation, Politics, Politicians
“Where is the remedy to be sought? At the hands of politicians? They may mean well enough, many of them at any rate, but politics and new political programs are no longer of service to the world—the world has had only too many of them. In the final analysis, the struggle of the politician amounts to little more than a struggle for power.”
— Fridtjof Nansen
Tagged: Politicians, Power
“The soul of the world is mortally sick, its courage broken, its ideals tarnished, and the will to live gone; the horizon is hazy, hidden behind burning clouds of destruction, and faith in the dawn of mankind is no more.”
— Fridtjof Nansen
Tagged: Soul, sickness, World War I, Will to Live
“That is how I see mankind in its suffering; that is how I see the suffering people of Europe, bleeding to death on deserted battlefields after conflicts which to a great extent were not their own.”
— Fridtjof Nansen
Tagged: Mankind, Suffering, Europe, bleeding, World War I
“He was driven to fight for foreign gods whom he did not know, far from his own country. And thus he met his fate. Now he lies there, dying in silence. The noise of the fray no longer reaches his ear. His dimmed eyes are turned inward, perhaps on a final vision of his childhood home where life was simple and happy, of his birthplace deep in the forests of Gaul.”
— Fridtjof Nansen
Tagged: World War I, Fate, Childhood, Gaul
“Let me tell you the secret of such so-called successes as there have been in my life, and here I believe I give you really good advice. It was to burn my boats and demolish my bridges behind me. Then one loses no time in looking behind, when one should have quite enough to do in looking ahead...”
— Fridtjof Nansen
Tagged: Burning Bridges
“The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer.”
— Fridtjof Nansen
Tagged: difficult, impossible
“It is better to go skiing and think of God, than to go to church and think of sport.”
— Fridtjof Nansen
Tagged: Skiing, God, Church, Sport
“The history of the human race is a continual struggle from darkness towards light. It is, therefore, to no purpose to discuss the use of knowledge; man wants to know, and when he ceases to do so, he is no longer man.”
— Fridtjof Nansen
Tagged: human race, History, Struggle, Knowledge
“Hope is a rickety craft to trust one’s self to.”
— Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest North
Tagged: Hope, Rickety
“…beneath this crust, hundreds of fathoms down, there teems a world of checkered life in all its changing forms, a world of the same composition as ours, with the same instincts, the same sorrows, and also, no doubt, the same joys; everywhere the same struggle for existence. So it ever is. If we penetrate within even the hardest shell we come upon the pulsations of life, however thick the crust may be.”
— Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest North
Tagged: Exterior, Shell, Defensiveness, Sorrow, Joy
“Love is life's snow. It falls deepest and softest into the gashes left by the fight whiter and purer than snow itself.”
— Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest North
Tagged: Love, Pure, Snow
“Here I sit in the still winter night on the drifting ice-floe, and see only stars above me. Far off I see the threads of life twisting themselves into the intricate web which stretches unbroken from life’s sweet morning dawn to the eternal death-stillness of ice. Thought follows thought—you pick the whole to pieces, and it seems so small—but high above all towers one form.…Why did you take this voyage?…Could I do otherwise? Can the river arrest its course and run up hill? My plan has come to nothing. That palace of theory which I reared, in pride and self-confidence, high above all silly objections has fallen like a house of cards at the first breath of wind. Build up the most ingenious theories and you may be sure of one thing—that fact will defy them all. Was I so very sure? Yes, at times; but that was self-deception, intoxication. A secret doubt lurked behind all the reasoning. It seemed as though the longer I defended my theory, the nearer I came to doubting it. But no, there is not getting over the evidence of that Siberian drift-wood. But if, after all, we are on the wrong track, what then? Only disappointed human hopes, nothing more. And even if we perish, what will it matter in the endless cycles of eternity?”
— Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest North
Tagged: Ice-Floe, Siberia, Hope, Eternity
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