Nevil Shute Quotes

In war, everything changes. You are very selective of what you do because everything you do can be the last thing you do in your life.

A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death.

You're never more alive than in battle." "Never more dead after," I say.

There are only two kinds of men; the dead and the deadly.

Boss, life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble.

When you go to war, it's important for everybody to know that they're going to come home in one way or other.

I became an air display pilot. I used to teach it. I was an examiner for a few years as well. It was great fun. I would still be doing it now if pretty much everyone I knew who was doing it hadn't died. In the first team I joined there were six people in it. By the time I stopped, there was only me and one other left - everyone else had died.

To be alive at all involves some risk.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

We were born and we die. In between, I think we try to live as best we can.

I've been doing extremely dangerous activities for a long time, but I've been lucky enough to have survived so far. However, sooner or later we all die... and, if that's the case, I want to die doing what I love to do the most. That's how I view death.

Explorers have to be ready to die lost.

Anyone who's traveled with me to Afghanistan knows why I love this book: 'War,' by Sebastian Junger.

Living is risking.

But we survived, didn’t we? That makes it an adventure. If you get killed it’s a tragedy.

Not only do the brave get killed, but the brave have a better chance of it.

A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.

Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die.

If you're afraid to die, you will not be able to live.

So go out and live real good and I promise you'll get beat up real bad. But, in a little while after you're dead, you'll be rotted away anyway. It's not gonna matter if you have a few scars. It will matter if you didn't live.

There are dreadful moments when death comes very near those we love, even if for the time being it passes by. But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living.

It was that quality that led me into aviation in the first place — it was a love of the air and sky and flying, the lure of adventure, the appreciation of beauty. It lay beyond the descriptive words of man — where immortality is touched through danger, where life meets death on equal plane; where man is more than man, and existence both supreme and valueless at the same instant.

Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in a fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?

I'm not bound to be in aviation at all. I'm here only because I love the sky and flying more than anything else on earth. Of course there's danger; but a certain amount of danger is essential to the quality of life. I don't believe in taking foolish chances' but nothing can be accomplished without taking any chance at all.

The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger, and play dice for death.