Quotes About Resilience

They thus remained almost motionless, while their supply of meat dwindled alarmingly.

Each dog in turn was taken off his trace and led behind a row of large ice hummocks.

Shackleton decided to spare Greenstreet's team of year-old puppies "for the present

consisting of canned vegetables, tapioca, dog pemmican, and jam.

and the Endurance lay in a small pool of open water—truly afloat for the first time since she was beset nine months before.

Hurley's team though, including the leader, Shakespeare, the biggest of all the dogs, was shot.

Shackleton wrote, almost timorously, "This may be the turn in our fortune.

But at five o'clock they knew it was time to give up. She was done, and nobody needed to tell them.

Shackleton immediately asked Macklin if he felt too tired to go back again to Ocean Camp

Alexandra of England. Shackleton carried the Bible in his hand as he left the Endurance

where the stores left in 1902 should still be.

and they would be dragging two of their three boats with them

On February 9, Shackleton wrote: "No seals. Must reduce blubber consumption . . . oh for a touch of dry land under our feet.

Tom Crean, tough and practical as ever, took the younger puppies

Shackleton immediately ran back to camp, going from tent to tent shouting

They had had no sleep for almost eighty hours, and their bodies had been drained by exposure

Another night, this time without a drop of water, and possibly another gale—they simply did not have it in them.

And yet they had adjusted with surprisingly little trouble to their new life, and most of them were quite sincerely happy. The adaptability of the human creature is such that they actually had to remind themselves on occasion of their desperate circumstances.

No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail.

In that instant they felt an overwhelming sense of pride and accomplishment. Though they had failed dismally even to come close to the expedition's original objective, they knew now that somehow they had done much, much more than ever they set out to do.

Of all their enemies -- the cold, the ice, the sea -- he feared none more than demoralization.

Fortitudine vincimus—"By endurance we conquer.

In some ways they had come to know themselves better. In this lonely world of ice and emptiness, they had achieved at least a limited kind of contentment. They had been tested and found not wanting.

The rapidity with which one can completely change one's ideas . . . and accommodate ourselves to a state of barbarism is wonderful.