Lewis Pugh Quotes

When you are walking up a mountain to attempt something that nobody’s ever tried before, and you pass people bringing corpses down, it becomes very clear that if you get it wrong, the consequences could be fatal.

This wasn’t some kind of stunt. This was a symbolic swim, and I needed to be courageous. [...] Swimming in a wetsuit or drysuit just wouldn’t send the right signal.

Never plan for victory and defeat in your mind at the same time.

When you have hope in the future, you have power in the present. And when you lose that hope, your dream goes with it.

I’m not a rule-breaker by nature. But there are times when you need to untangle yourself from red tape. Because the truth is, if you wait for permission, some things will simply never happen.

The most powerful form of self-belief comes from believing in something greater than you. Because when you’ve got purpose, everything becomes possible.

I knew now that I had to stand up and start speaking about protecting our environment. From that moment on, every swim should have the aim of inspiring people to protect and preserve the world’s oceans and all that live in them.

The essence of any great achievement is to believe in your purpose.

They have [...] a split personality. One moment they’re your best mate, and next they are trying to drag you down to the bottom of the sea to drown you. [...] It’s just astonishing.

A massive turquoise glacier feeds into Magdalenefjord, with chunks of ice as big as buildings breaking off and landing in the water to float away as icebergs. As I swam past them, with my head in the water, I heard a tantalising sound: a snap-crackle-pop, just like Rice Krispies in milk. It was the sound of tiny air bubbles being released from the ice – air that had been trapped there as much as 3,000 years ago. To swim through this sound, I thought, is to swim in history.

Thoughts alone won’t make extraordinary things happen. But nothing ever happens if you don’t visualise it first.

I don’t know of any sport where the goalposts can shift the way they do with endurance swimming.

When people say to me, you must have a very strong mind to swim across the North Pole, or off Antarctica or on Mount Everest, I tell them that endurance swimming builds good mental strength.

...when you swim from England to France you’ve got to leave your doubt on the beach at Dover.

I have been haunted by that swim through the whale graveyard and haven’t been able to get the image of the bones out of my head. Man hunted whales almost to the point of extinction, not seeming to care that we would lose one of the wonders of the sea world forever. It is the coldness of the water in Antarctica that preserves the bones and makes it look like they were left there yesterday but I like to think they are there as a reminder of man’s potential for folly.