Nansen Quotes

“Perhaps Nansen, or at least the name of his ship, owed something to Verne as well. Jules Verne, the great French pioneer of science fiction, had also shown interest in the Arctic. Some thirty years earlier, he had published The English at the North Pole, in which there figured an expedition ship called Forward – of which Fram, naturally, was the Norwegian equivalent.”
― Roland Huntford, Nansen: The Explorer as Hero

“All his life he had waited for ‘the great idea that … would hit me like a bolt of lightning’. Youth was when ‘the bolts of lightning come, if they are ever to strike … But now … I am hardly really young any longer … and the future is unlikely to bring any.”
― Roland Huntford, Nansen: The Explorer as Hero

“Nansen introduced what has come to be known as the layer principle. Still faithful to Dr Jaeger’s precepts, he stuck to pure wool. There were to be four layers: underwear, shirt, sweater and, finally, jacket, knee breeches and leggings made of a tough, thick Norwegian woollen material called vadmel.”
― Roland Huntford, Nansen: The Explorer as Hero

“when ‘one leads a nomadic life, as I do at the moment, it is not easy to do everything at the right time’.”
― Roland Huntford, Nansen: The Explorer as Hero