Thor Heyerdahl Quotes

So this piece of dirt waits four and a half billion years and evolves and changes, and now a strange creature stands here with instruments and talks to the strange creatures in the audience. What a wonderful world!

When I am at a dinner table, I love to ask everybody, 'How long do you think our species might last?' I've read that the average age of a species, of any species, is about two million years. Is it possible we can have an average life span as a species? And do you picture us two million years more or a million and a half years, or 5,000?

Our time on Earth is so random.

It's wonderful to know you're aging, because that means you're still on the planet, right?

There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence—or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them.

What we know for sure from our work and from others' is that mice have a life span of 1,000 days, dogs have 5,000 days, and we humans have 29,000 days. Recognizing that the duration is limited, and aging is inevitable, focus the attention on enhancing the quality of the days you have.

It's paradoxical, that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn't appeal to anyone.

To me it seems that the warm blooded dinosaurs replaced advanced mammal ancestors that were warm blooded, also.

By the age of 50, I would like to know that I'm not dead - that there's some continuity to my life.

No one longs to live more than someone growing old.

I didn't know I was going to live for 50 years. It has come as a shock.

I have to tell you I never in my life anticipated getting this old, this fast. It seems as if I were 25 just a few days ago.

So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.

They that have lived a single day have lived an age.

Very few species have survived unchanged. There's one called lingula, which is a little shellfish, a little brachiopod about the size of my fingernail, that has survived for 500 million years, but it's survived by being unobtrusive and doing nothing, and you can't accuse human beings of that.

When you really deep down look at it, we go to bed every night, get up every morning, stay here for 70 or 80 years, and then we die.

Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself.

People always say life is short. I've never been convinced of that - mine seems to have a tendency to go on and on.

If you're not getting older, you're dead.

From my perspective, there's no reason to be afraid of aging, because if you age, you're lucky! The alternative is death.

I don't expect to live forever, but I do intend to hang on as long as possible.

Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.

Ageing's alright, better than the alternative, which is not being here.

It is inevitable that those to whom is vouchsafed a long life of usefulness should outlive the friends of their youth.

It's good to be here. At 98, it's good to be anywhere.