Hope is a rickety craft to trust one’s self to.
Catalog
Fridtjof Nansen
Fridtjof Nansen (Norwegian: [²fɾitːjɔf ˈnɑnsn̩]; 10 October 1861 – 13 May 1930) was a Norwegian explorer, scientist, diplomat, humanitarian, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In his youth he was a champion skier and ice skater. He led the team that made the first crossing of the Greenland interior in 1888, traversing the island on cross-country skis. He won international fame after reaching a record northern latitude of 86°14′ during his North Pole expedition of 1893–96. Although he retired from exploration after his return to Norway, his techniques of polar travel and his innovations in equipment and clothing influenced a generation of subsequent Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. Nansen studied zoology at the Royal Frederick University in Christiania (renamed Oslo in 1925), and later worked as a curator at the University Museum of Bergen where his research on the central nervous system of lower marine creatures earned him a doctorate and helped establish neuron doctrine. Later, famed neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal would win the 1906 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research on the same subject, though "technical priority" for the theory is given to Nansen. After 1896 his main scientific interest switched to oceanography; in the course of his research he made many scientific cruises, mainly in the North Atlantic, and contributed to the development of modern oceanographic equipment. As one of his country's leading citizens, in 1905 Nansen spoke out for the ending of Norway's union with Sweden, and was instrumental in persuading Prince Carl of Denmark to accept the throne of the newly independent Norway. Between 1906 and 1908 he served as the Norwegian representative in London, where he helped negotiate the Integrity Treaty that guaranteed Norway's independent statu
…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…
Love is life's snow. It falls deepest and softest into the gashes left by the fight whiter and purer than snow itself.
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…
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…
No future, however, can be built on despair, distrust, hatred, and 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…
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?
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…
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.
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.
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…
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...
The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer.
It is better to go skiing and think of God, than to go to church and think of 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.