Thor Heyerdahl Quotes Page 2

“I definitely smelled a delicious odor of steak and onions. But it turned out to be only a dirty shirt.”

“If you can't deal with your own demons, what's the last thing left for you?

to drift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a small raft.”

“It was a great moment on board when two large boobies were spotted above the horizon to westward.”

“Land! An island! We devoured it greedily with our eyes and woke the others, who tumbled out drowsily and stared in all directions as if they thought our bow was about to run on to a beach.

Screaming seabirds formed a bridge across the sky in the direction of the distant island, which stood out sharper against the horizon as the red background widened and turned gold with the approach of the sun and the full daylight.”

“No tempest at sea is harder on a man than to stand alone encircled by a firing squad of international authorities. A firm conviction of being in the right becomes your only armor against the barrage of assaults that can often be both personal and unfair.

Yet dissidence and controversy are what bring science forward. Agreement and acceptance rarely stimulate experiments and progress.”

“Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but, when you are right in the midst of it, you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about.”

“Order number one, which came first and last, was: Hold on to the raft! Whatever happened, we must hang on tight on board and let the nine great logs take the pressure from the reef.

We ourselves had more than enough to do to withstand the weight of the water. If we jumped overboard, we should become helpless victims of the suction which would fling us in and out over the sharp corals.

The rubber raft would capsize in the steep seas or, heavily loaded with us in it, it would be torn to ribbons against the reef. But the wooden logs would sooner or later be cast ashore, and we with them, if we only managed to hold fast.”

“Otherwise he was glad we had missed our landing, for he still had three books to read.”

“Pearls rarely turn up in oysters served to you on a plate; you have to dive for them.”

“Purgatory was a bit damp but heaven was more or less as I’d imagined it.”

“Some people believe in Fate, others don't. I do, and I don't. It may seem at times as if invisible fingers move us above like puppets on strings.

But for sure, we are not born to be dragged along. We can grab the strings ourselves and adjust our course at every crossroad, or take off at any little trail into the unknown.”

“The Kon-Tiki expedition opened my eyes to what the ocean really is. It is a conveyor and not an isolator.

The ocean has been man's highway from the days he built the first buoyant ships, long before he tamed the horse, invented wheels, and cut roads through the virgin jungles.”

“The sea contains many surprises for him who has his floor on a level with the surface and drifts along slowly and noiselessly.

A sportsman who breaks his way through the woods may come back and say that no wild life is to be seen. Another may sit down on a stump and wait, and often rustlings and cracklings will begin and curious eyes peer out. So it is on the sea, too.

We usually plow across it with roaring engines and piston strokes, with the water foaming round our bow. Then we come back and say that there is nothing to see far out on the ocean.”

“The task of science is investigation pure and simple. Not to try to prove this or that.”

“They’re specialists, the whole lot of them, and they don’t believe in a method of work which cuts into every field of science from botany to archaeology. They limit their own scope in order to be able to dig in the depths with more concentration for details.

Modern research demands that every special branch shall dig in its own hole. It’s not usual for anyone to sort out what comes up out of the holes and try to put it all together.”