Top 160 Bear Grylls Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The special forces gave me the self-confidence to do some extraordinary things in my life. Climbing Everest then cemented my belief in myself.”

— Bear Grylls

102. “As a young boy, scouting gave me a confidence and camaraderie that is hard to find in modern life.”

— Bear Grylls

103. “To me, adventure has always been to me the connections and bounds you create with people when you’re there. And you can have that anywhere.”

— Bear Grylls

104. “I love home cooking, and I’m not a great one for fast food.”

— Bear Grylls

105. “Life has taught me to be very cautious of a man with a dream, especially a man who has teetered on the edge of life. It gives a fire and recklessness inside that is hard to quantify.”

— Bear Grylls

106. “Accidents on big mountains happen when people’s ambitions cloud their good judgment. Good climbing is about climbing with heart and with instinct, not ambition and pride.”

— Bear Grylls

107. “That feeling when you’re so cold you’d give anything to be warm – I’ve had it before, literally huddled around a candle flame on an ice sheet.”

— Bear Grylls

108. “I think viewers quite like it when I’m suffering or eating or drinking something horrible or really up against it in some quicksand or whatever.”

— Bear Grylls

109. “My favorite moments? Where it’s all going swimmingly, the sun’s out and I’ve got a fire going and a nice snake on the barbecue.”

— Bear Grylls

110. “When I’m in ‘Man vs. Wild’ mode, it’s not pleasure. Every sensor is firing and I’m on reserve power all the time and I’m digging deep – and that’s the magic of it as well, and that’s raw and it’s great.”

— Bear Grylls

111. “I have held healthy respects of bears along with assorted crocodiles, snakes and lots of other animals. You know, bears are dangerous, you have to be super careful.”

— Bear Grylls

112. “I’ve eaten sheep’s eyes, the still hot meat from a zebra killed by a lion, and maggots which give you 70 calories to the ounce.”

— Bear Grylls

113. “Textbook survival tells you to stay put. Stop. Wait for rescue. Don’t take any risks. But there’d been a whole host of survival shows like that and I didn’t really want to do that.”

— Bear Grylls

114. “I’m probably going to be the scruffiest Chief Scout you’ve ever had and my health and safety policy is non-existent.”

— Bear Grylls

115. “I do see a lot of the hard end of ecology, and my feeling is that we live on a super-exciting planet but a super-fragile one.”

— Bear Grylls

116. “I always had a really natural faith as a kid. Where I knew God existed and it felt very free and pretty wild and natural, and it wasn’t religious.”

— Bear Grylls

117. “One thing I know for sure: it is only by doing what we fear that we can ever truly learn to be brave.”

— Bear Grylls

118. “I hang out all the time with kids and young scouts and I never meet kids who don’t want adventure.”

— Bear Grylls

119. “The line between life or death is determined by what we are willing to do.”

— Bear Grylls

120. “The rewards of the wild and the rewards of the survivor go to those who can dig deep, and, ultimately, to the guy who can stay alive.”

— Bear Grylls

121. “One killer exercise that’s really great is pull-ups with your legs out level. That’s my favourite. It’s such functional core strength, and that’s why I can climb up trees and down vines.”

— Bear Grylls

122. “I had many opportunities to get behind products in the past, and I was always careful to evaluate all of them. I will not put my name to shoddy items.”

— Bear Grylls

123. “I’ve had so many injuries in my life that it’s ridiculous.”

— Bear Grylls

124. “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.”

— Bear Grylls

125. “You don’t need to go to the ends of the earth, you don’t need to climb Everest to have a great adventure, it’s invariably on our doorstep.”

— Bear Grylls

126. “All my life the only thing I’ve been good at has been climbing and throwing myself off big things.”

— Bear Grylls

127. “I didn’t want to do eight seasons of How To Build A Fire. The intention was to make something fun and dynamic and about self rescue, not about whittling.”

— Bear Grylls

128. “But, that guy who quit also missed the real point. Good things come through grit and hard work, and all things worthwhile have a cost. In the case of the SAS, the cost was somewhere around a thousand barrels of sweat.”

— Bear Grylls

129. “Scouts should be progressive and should be adapting. If you’re gay or not it’s irrelevant, Scouting values respect.”

— Bear Grylls

130. “I love Ray Mears. He’s brilliant. He’s so rude about me in the press, it’s outrageous!”

— Bear Grylls

131. “My faith is an important part of my life and over the years I’ve learnt that it takes a proud man to say he doesn’t need anything. It has been a quiet strength and a backbone through a lot of difficult times.”

— Bear Grylls

132. “I was super skeptical about doing TV. I said no three times, part of which was confidence because I didn’t really understand that world. I know how to climb mountains and do all that, but I wasn’t a TV person.”

— Bear Grylls

133. “But the winners are those who know that when things get really hard and others start to fall away, that is the time to dig deep and give that little bit extra.”

— Bear Grylls

134. “It’s unresolved conflict in my life that I have a lovely family and a risky job.”

— Bear Grylls

135. “I always wanted to be Robin Hood or John the Baptist when I was growing up.”

— Bear Grylls

136. “Textbook survival says stay still, don’t take any chances, wait for rescue. That’s a boring TV show. My thing was always, “Listen, shoelace, dead squirrel and no other way down this rock face. You can do this!””

— Bear Grylls

137. “Some of the greatest survivors have been women. Look at the courage so many women have shown after surviving earthquakes in the rubble for days on end.”

— Bear Grylls

138. “I think it’s fun running with dogs. They’re always so fit and fast.”

— Bear Grylls

139. “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.”

— Bear Grylls

140. “I come from a line of self-motivated, determined folk – not grand, not high society, but no-nonsense, family-minded go-getters.”

— Bear Grylls

141. “I wanted to work hard. I wanted to prove myself somehow worthy of the good things I had known.”

— Bear Grylls

142. “Their hands were also huge – two massive leathery mitts that looked like hairy wicket keeper’s gloves.”

— Bear Grylls

143. “I miss him still today: his long, whiskery eyebrows, his huge hands and hugs, his warmth, his prayers, his stories, but above all his shining example of how to live and how to die.”

— Bear Grylls

144. “For me, my training is a key part of my work as so often my life has depended on being able to move fast and haul myself up and out of something fast!”

— Bear Grylls

145. “Life rewards the dogged, not the qualified.”

— Bear Grylls

146. “As a former pilot in World War I, Walter had always preferred flying as a means of travel, rather than going by sea. Whenever he was in the Dakota, flying over to Northern Ireland, he always asked for the front seat, joking that if it crashed then he wanted to die first.”

— Bear Grylls

147. “I was always brought up to have a cup of tea at halfway up a rock face.”

— Bear Grylls

148. “I loved climbing because of the freedom, and having time and space. I remember coming off Everest for the last time, thinking of Dad and wishing that he could have seen what I saw. He would have loved it.”

— Bear Grylls

149. “It was like climbing a mountain of waist-deep molasses while giving someone a fireman’s carry, who, for good measure, was also trying to force a pair of frozen socks into your mouth. Nice.”

— Bear Grylls

150. “Three words that are the beating heart behind why many explorers or adventurers do what they do. ‘Because it’s there.”

— Bear Grylls