Bear Grylls Quotes

So often in the modern world we develop hard hearts and soft feet. God wants the exact opposite. Soft hearts and hard feet.

Stick to the fight when you're hardest hit,
It's when things seem worst that you must not quit.

Any blisters on your shoulder blades would weep painfully, as the weight of the pack went back on. Then somehow your mind would shut out the pain, for a while. Until, by the end of the march, your shoulders would start to wilt and cramp up as if they were on fire.

We were on a family holiday to Cyprus to visit my aunt and uncle. My uncle Andrew was then the brigadier to all the British forces on the island, and as such a senior military figure I am sure he must have dreaded us coming to town.
After a few days holed up in the garrison my uncle innocently suggested that maybe we would enjoy a trip to the mountains. He already knew the answer that my father and I would give. We were in.
The Troodos Mountains are a small range of snowy peaks in the center of the island, and the soldiers posted to Cyprus use them to ski and train in. There are a couple of ski runs, but the majority of the peaks in winter are wild and unspoiled.
In other words, they are ripe for an adventure.
Dad and I borrowed two sets of army skis and boots from the garrison up in the hills and spent a great afternoon together skiing down the couple of designated runs. But designated runs can also be quite boring. We both looked at each other and suggested a quick off-piste detour.
It was all game…age eleven.
It wasn’t very far into this between-the-trees deep-powder detour that the weather, dramatically, and very suddenly, took a turn for the worse.
A mountain mist rolled in, reducing visibility to almost zero. We stopped to try and get, or guess, our directions back to the piste, but our guess was wrong, and very soon we both realized we were lost. (Or temporarily geographically challenged, as I have learned to call it.)
Dad and I made the mistake that so many do in that situation, and plowed on blind, in the vain hope that the miraculous would occur. We had no map, no compass, no food, no water, no mobile telephone (they hadn’t even been invented yet), and in truth, no likelihood of finding our way.
We were perfect candidates for a disaster.

The area became known affectionately by the other recruits as simply: ‘The asshole of the world.

Traditional survival was portrayed a little boring when I was young.
When we made Man vs Wild, the goal wasn’t to show how tough one person could be.
It was to show what all of us are capable of when things get hard.
Fear. Fatigue. Failure.
And then learning, adapting, pushing on.
If the show made survival exciting, it’s because survival is about hope.
It’s about ordinary people discovering strength they didn’t know they had.
That lesson belongs to everyone.

You can't become a decent horseman until you fall off and get up again, a good number of times.
There's life in a nutshell.

Don't run from the pruning. Trust the process, stay faithful in the storm, and see the long game.

The day before our final exercise had begun, the DS had made the briefing crystal clear.
“Don’t give them anything or they will exploit it. Be smart. Stay focused despite the pain and fatigue. Slip up for a second and you fail. And no one is your friend, until you see me walk in wearing a white cross on my sleeve. Only then is the exercise over.”
“The Red CROSS is not my white cross; a vicar’s CROSS is not my white cross…the offer of a hot-CROSS bun and a sip of tea is not my white cross. Do you understand?”
He reiterated. “Don’t get caught out — not at this stage of Selection.

These made Trucker and me look back on the summer Selection days as quite balmy and pleasant! It is strange how accustomed you become to hardship, and how what once seemed horrific can soon become mundane.

And if you give your heart to a goal, it will repay you. It's the law of the universe.

Why is it that the finish line always tends to appear just after the point at which we most want to give up? Is it the universe's way of reserving the best for those who can give the most?
What I do know, from nature, is that the dawn only appears after the darkest hour.

During my time at Eton, I led regular nighttime adventures, and word spread. I even thought about charging to take people on trips.
I remember one where we tried to cross the whole town of Eton in the old sewers. I had found an old grill under a bridge that led into these four-foot-high old brick pipes, running under the streets.
It took a little nerve to probe into these in the pitch black with no idea where the hell they were leading you; and they stank.
I took a pack of playing cards and a flashlight, and I would jam cards into the brickwork every ten paces to mark my way. Eventually I found a manhole cover that lifted up, and it brought us out in the little lane right outside the headmaster’s private house.
I loved that. “All crap flows from here,” I remember us joking at that time.

positive word of warning, though: you might find that once you start eating more of the healthy stuff, your body will no longer like it when you eat the bad stuff.

Winston Churchill (him again!) once said words to the effect that everyone gets the chance to make their fortune once, but not everybody takes it.