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

Making the complicated simple is true creativity.

Jazz music is a language of the emotions.

I never heard my music played the way I heard it in my head.

My music is evidence of my souls will to live.

I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

From the sentimental point of view, it is the last great Polar journey that can be made.

After months of want and hunger, we suddenly found ourselves able to have meals fit for the gods, and with appetites the gods might have envied.

Teachers should be very careful not to spoil their pupils' taste for poetry for all time by making it a task and an imposition.

The noise resembles the roar of heavy, distant surf. Standing on the stirring ice one can imagine it is disturbed by the breathing and tossing of a mighty giant below.

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

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

Optimism is the true moral courage

I called to the other men that the sky was clearing, and then a moment later I realized that what I had seen was not a rift in the clouds but the white crest of an enormous wave.

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

A man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground.

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

When things are easy, I hate it.