The Lost World

by Arthur Conan Doyle

"But chances are all around you. It is the mark of the kind of man I mean that he makes his own chances.

There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done.

for it is only when a man goes out into the world with the thought that there are heroisms all round him, and with the desire all alive in his heart to follow any which may come within sight of him, that he breaks away as I did from the life he knows, and ventures forth into the wonderful mystic twilight land where lie the great adventures and the great rewards.

"You seem very anxious to lose your life." "To justify my life, Sir."

I have an Irish imagination which makes the unknown and the untried more terrible than they are.

There are times, young fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right and justice, or you never feel clean again. That's why I made a little war on my own. Declared it myself, waged it myself, ended it myself.

I'm like an old golf-ball—I've had all the white paint knocked off me long ago. Life can whack me about now, and it can't leave a mark.

"What you admit, sir, or what you do not admit, is really of inconceivably small importance.