Lewis Pugh Quotes

#1. I do have spare time and I love to read, and I love just to go to a national park and just relax and just think. But most of the time, it's swimming or talking.

Lewis Pugh

#2. Mount Everest is a very spiritual place, it's a beautiful mountain.

Lewis Pugh

#3. If you've got a problem and you multiply it by 50-million people, it becomes unsolvable, but if you've got a problem and you divide it by 50-million people, it becomes solvable.

Lewis Pugh

#4. I think every child in every country, not just South Africa, every year should go to a national park, and it should be part of their basic curriculum.

Lewis Pugh

#5. I think that I was slightly naive. I thought that if I showed people the beauty of the Arctic and the beauty of the polar bears that they would care so much that they would stand up and try to make a change.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#6. The human body is not designed for swimming in minus 1.7 degree centigrade water.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#7. When I'm preparing for a swim, I imagine absolutely everything about it: the color of the water, how cold it is, the taste of salt in my mouth. I visualize each and every stroke.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#8. Not to be too grandiose about it, but in a way I see myself like Sir Edmund Hillary. The water was my Everest.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#9. Sometimes we set boundaries for ourselves in life, or even worse, we allow others to do so. In many cases, these boundaries are just in our mind and need to be pushed away.

Lewis Pugh

#10. In the cold, all the blood rushes to your core to protect your heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, and brain. When you leave the water, the blood rushes back to your arms and legs, absorbs that freezing cold, and brings it back to the heart.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#11. On 15 July 2007, I swam across an open patch of sea at the North Pole to highlight the melting of the Arctic sea ice.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#12. I had a dream , okay, go do a swim off Antarctica, and I'd train in Gauteng and just dive into the sea off Antarctica ... You've really got to do a simulated test as best you can in South Africa before you go off.

Lewis Pugh

#13. Climate change is the Everest of all problems, the thorniest challenge facing humankind.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#14. We have to appreciate that we are part of nature, we must work with nature; the environment is our lifeline.

Lewis Pugh

#15. Of all the creatures in the world that really frighten me - the hyena in Africa, the great white shark - leopard seals are near the top of the list. They're killers. If my team spots one, they'll pull me out of the water.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#16. The days of exploration of Shackleton and Scott are long gone. Everything has been climbed, crossed, done. Now what we're exploring are the full boundaries of human endeavour. It's not physical - it's all in the head.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#17. Britain has bred many great explorers, but they seem to get so little coverage compared to soccer and rugby players.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#18. I've got two dogs - one's a Jack Russell and she's one year old now, and I've got another dog called Kanga, and I got him from a rescue shelter, and there's nothing I enjoy more than just walking them on the beach in Cape Town. I find that very destressing and very relaxing.

Lewis Pugh

#19. I was asked to give a speech on the Everest swim, and during the Everest swim, I changed. I changed as a person, I honestly did. That mountain changed me, and I gave a speech about it for nine minutes.

Lewis Pugh

#20. The problem with climate change is that it's quite complicated for the ordinary person to understand.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#21. You shouldn't be able to do a swim at the North Pole, it should be frozen over.

Lewis Pugh

#22. I just never, ever want to give up. Most battles are won in the 11th hour, and most people give up. If you give up once, it's quite hard. If you give up a second time, it's a little bit easier. Give up a third time, it's starting to become a habit.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#23. I can't think of anything more important than the environment we leave to our children and our children's children.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#24. On my second swim at Deception Island, the water was very clear and I was looking at hundreds of whale bones beneath me. It was a graveyard from the whaling some time in the 1920s-30s.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#25. I learned two basic lessons on Everest. First, just because something has worked in the past does not mean it will work today. Second, different challenges require different mindsets.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#26. Very few things which are really worth achieving come easily. Sometimes they do, but most of the time you really have to work hard and cleverly.

Lewis Pugh

#27. Swimming has been a very effective medium for telling a story about the state of our planet.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#28. I love swimming, swimming's my passion and I hope I swim until the last day of my life, so I really, really do enjoy swimming, but swimming for me is simply a way of carrying a message.

Lewis Pugh

#29. We need to save the Arctic not because of the polar bears, and not because it is the most beautiful place in the world, but because our very survival depends upon it.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#30. I'm one of the lucky people that, my job is my passion, is my hobby. I hope this doesn't sound arrogant: I truly feel that this is what I'm meant to do, to swim and to talk about protecting the environment, my two passions.

Lewis Pugh

#31. I've been on swims where people have freaked out about sharks. You have to think about something else, otherwise it will absolutely paralyze you. I do math problems, anything.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#32. Ordinary won't change the world.

Lewis Pugh

#33. I've seen some glaciers in the world which have been, which are just turquoise blue blue glaciers up in the Arctic. It's tragic to think that because of climate change, because of man's actions, they're melting away.

Lewis Pugh

#34. When I was born, the world's population was 3.5 billion. There are now 6.8 billion people on the planet. By 2050, that's expected to rise to 9.4 billion. What's more, the Earth's resources aren't growing; they're decreasing - and rapidly.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#35. Normally I don't race other people; I challenge the environment and my own limitations.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#36. The businessmen of the world who are not taking environmental matters seriously are just wasting money, aside from damaging the environment it's wasting money and in this economic climate you just can't afford to do that.

Lewis Pugh

#37. I wish politicians would put the environment at the centre of every agenda.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#38. The swim at Deception Island was by far the hardest swim I've ever done. Antarctica is a very unforgiving environment. If you don't train properly, you'll die.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#39. I got bored and then joined the British SAS. It was five very exciting years of my life, and then I'd always had this passion for swimming, so started swimming around the world, in some of the most exotic and distant and dangerous locations.

Lewis Pugh

#40. I was very, very lucky because I started swimming when most of the landmarks in the world had not been swum.

Lewis Pugh