Top 35 Thor Heyerdahl Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Borders? I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

2. “Progress is man’s ability to complicate simplicity.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

3. “For every minute, the future is becoming the past.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

4. “Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but, when you are right in the midst of it, you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

5. “In fighting nature, man can win every battle except the last. If he should win that too, he will perish, like an embryo cutting its own umbilical cord.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

6. “I don’t believe in war as a solution to any kind of conflict, nor do I believe in heroism on the battlefield because I have never seen any.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

7. “A civilized nation can have no enemies, and one cannot draw a line across a map, a line that doesn’t even exist in nature and say that the ugly enemy lives on the one side, and good friends live on the other.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

8. “I was in uniform for four years, and I know that heroism doesn’t occur from taking orders, but rather from people who through their own willpower and strength are willing to sacrifice their lives for an idea.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

9. “We are not talking about esthetics. We are talking about life: survival of Man. We must train young people to get another vision of Nature. We call it ‘wilderness,’ and we think it is progress to get further and further away from it. How crazy! Where would we have been if Nature had not built us up?”

— Thor Heyerdahl

10. “The Kon-Tiki expedition opened my eyes to what the ocean really is. It is a conveyor and not an isolator. The ocean has been man’s highway from the days he built the first buoyant ships, long before he tamed the horse, invented wheels, and cut roads through the virgin jungles.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

11. “I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don’t believe it exists. I’ve felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist. Nor does the future exist.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

12. “In my experience, it is rarer to find a really happy person in a circle of millionaires than among vagabonds.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

13. “Pearls rarely turn up in oysters served to you on a plate; you have to dive for them.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

14. “Those who have experienced the most, have suffered so much that they have ceased to hate. Hate is more for those with a slightly guilty conscience, and who by chewing on old hate in times of peace wish to demonstrate how great they were during the war.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

15. “But if we begin thinking about the world being over 100 million years old, then it’s absolutely by chance that you and I are sitting here alive today, while all the others are dead or have never been born.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

16. “An outsider may wonder how deep a specialist must dig his hole before he realizes that he has lost sight of the horizon...”

— Thor Heyerdahl

17. “No tempest at sea is harder on a man than to stand alone encircled by a firing squad of international authorities. A firm conviction of being in the right becomes your only armor against the barrage of assaults that can often be both personal and unfair. Yet dissidence and controversy are what bring science forward. Agreement and acceptance rarely stimulate experiments and progress.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

18. “The Kon-Tiki expedition opened my eyes to what the ocean really is. It is a conveyor and not an isolator.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

19. “It is also rarer to find happiness in a man surrounded by the miracles of technology than among people living in the desert of the jungle and who by the standards set by our society would be considered destitute and out of touch.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

20. “Circumstances cause us to act the way we do. We should always bear this in mind before judging the actions of others. I realized this from the start during World War II.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

21. “We must wake up to the insane reality of our time. We are all irresponsible, unless we demand from the responsible decision makers that modern armaments must no longer be made available to people whose former battle axes and swords our ancestors condemned.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

22. “We have always been taught that navigation is the result of civilization, but modern archeology has demonstrated very clearly that this is not so.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

23. “In a city a man may feel second to none. But alone in the immensity of the universe, among all the creatures that preceded man and built up the human species, even a most fervent atheist will wonder if Darwin found the visible road but not the invisible mechanism.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

24. “It is progress when a centuries-old oak is cut down to give space for a road sign.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

25. “Through a misunderstanding one native visitor was shot on board one of the ships, and a dozen others were shot ashore, while the Europeans got off with the loss of one tablecloth and of a few hats which were stolen while they had them on their heads.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

26. “Man invents the most inhuman armaments to assault others so like himself that uniforms are needed to distinguish between friend and foe.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

27. “I also believe that when one dies, one may wake up to the reality that proves that time does not exist.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

28. “It is progress when weapons are improved to kill more people at a longer range.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

29. “But you can’t navigate a raft,” he added. “It goes sideways and backward and round as the wind takes it.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

30. “Then we heard, rather faintly, in the receiver: “If all’s well, why worry?”

— Thor Heyerdahl

31. “The task of science is investigation pure and simple,” he said quietly. “Not to try to prove this or that.” He.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

32. “Civilization grew in the beginning from the minute that we had communication – particularly communication by sea that enabled people to get inspiration and ideas from each other and to exchange basic raw materials.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

33. “Surrounded by military airplanes and warships from the world’s most civilized and developed nations, we have been denied permission by friendly governments, for reasons of security, to land anywhere, but in the tiny, and still neutral, Republic of Djibouti.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

34. “Agreement and acceptance rarely stimulate experiments and progress.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

35. “Otherwise he was glad we had missed our landing, for he still had three books to read.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

36. “They’re specialists, the whole lot of them, and they don’t believe in a method of work which cuts into every field of science from botany to archaeology. They limit their own scope in order to be able to dig in the depths with more concentration for details. Modern research demands that every special branch shall dig in its own hole. It’s not usual for anyone to sort out what comes up out of the holes and try to put it all together.”

— Thor Heyerdahl

37. “I definitely smelled a delicious odor of steak and onions. But it turned out to be only a dirty shirt.”

— Thor Heyerdahl