Top 30 Yossi Ghinsberg Quotes

Surviving is not something you need to learn. You don’t need to learn survival skills; you have them already. That’s why we’re here, all of us, because it’s a game of survival anyway.

I think we suffer from certain alienation. We live on this planet, but we somehow have an idea that we’re elevated from it, that we’re not nature. We’re a creature that manages nature and is superior and does whatever it wants. That creates a separation between humanity and the rest of the planet.

You don’t need too much to have an agenda of how to father. You just have to be a good person. The interactions at home between you and your spouse and the way you deal with your kids in certain situations, that’s what they take.

I’m not an expert on India-Pakistan relations, but, Pakistan is big enough without Kashmir and India too is big enough without Kashmir.

If you find your freedom, if you find something that cannot be taken from you, then you’re free. If your freedom depends on what you have, or you position, or your security, or anything that is just passing, because those are just waves of things.

I wanted to go to the extreme in the sense of places that were not explored and meeting people, tribes. I wanted to have an adventure.

I had no lasting physical trauma nor a psychological one. Yet, it was hard to return to the old path. I found myself asking big questions: Why was my life spared? What is my purpose here? And it led me to a life of inquiry.

At one point, I shook a tree full of fire ants on my head just to have some pain to distract me from my aching feet so that I could continue to walk.

I’d say that the only trauma I’ve suffered was existential.

For two days I had the company of a girl. She appeared next to me. It was no less of a miracle if it was my imagination which had summoned her up, because it happened at the very moment I had broken down and given up.

I became a very simple person. The simple things are the most precious to me. I don’t ascribe much significance to the things I have now. That feeling of touching death has never left me.

I wanted to be like the heroes of the books I read. That’s why I wanted to go to the jungle. I wasn’t interested in danger from the adrenaline aspect, I was more interested in the romance.

A professional knows what’s impossible. If you know it’s impossible, it is impossible. But if you don’t know it’s impossible, suddenly it is possible.

So once you hit like that place, where everything is stripped from you, everything is taken from you, you really discover who you really are. I discovered that I’m a real hero, that I can deal with that situation, that I can rise up to the challenge.

I went through big things at too young of an age, but, naturally, when you’re young you’re also adventurous.

Every time I found an egg to eat, or when I survived a storm in which trees were collapsing all around me, I felt that it was Providence. I don’t need to believe – I know.

Yes, I’m a fan, and ‘The Lost City of Z’ has been my inspiration. Percy Fawcett was one of my heroes, and I loved the book and the film. I was lost in the same area that Fawcett had explored, and I can identify with his sense of passion and obsession, and I definitely see the romance in searching for lost treasure.

When you lose everything, then you have something. It’s exactly the opposite because everything that you have, it’s not really yours. What is yours, you don’t need to earn. It’s yours by right.

You eat anything when you need energy to survive and there’s nothing in your body, when you are becoming just bones and tissues and muscles and I don’t wish those circumstances on anybody.

My Uncle Nissim studied Kabbalah. Just before he died, he gave this tiny book, its pages yellow with age. He said it had special powers. I had a feeling that the book helped to keep me safe. My daughter is called Nissim after him.

Living in Israel is similar to living in an island. It’s a very small and isolated place. It’s a very strong place in terms of the culture and the conditioning that you go through.

I definitely had some heated but extremely productive chats with screenwriter Justin Monjo, but while it’s my story, it’s their movie, so I have to allow for compression and poetic license.

I went to South America with the idea that I would be an explorer, that I’d find lost tribes, become one of them, marry the chief’s daughter and find riches of gold.

It was like a dream come true for me. When you write the book, it’s still intimate. It might have been a best-seller but it’s still my story, as I wrote it. The moment we or they make a movie, it’s not my story anymore. There’s a lot of letting go involved in the process.

As to the Amazon itself, the transition from conservation to sustainable development was a huge awakening since conservation was a western concept and strategy to encourage the developing world to protect biodiversity resources for the sake of future generations and the wellbeing of the planet.

Everyone at Arclight has been very supportive, professional, and warm, and working with producers Mike Gabrowy and Gary Hamilton has been a wonderful experience.

I have returned to the Amazon to thank the people that were involved in my rescue and upon meeting them I realised that their life is in danger. They have asked for my help on a community-based initiation of a tourism project.

The corporate sector in my view is the most important since it is actively involved in the shaping of our life on the planet. The corporate world has the power and the means to influence politics and public trends.

I think the main parenting or education you do for your children is by way of being, and not by way of having guidelines or some agenda. I think that life itself is constantly bringing learning opportunities.

I have discovered that inner search by far is the most uncharted domain and it needs great courage and determination to cut through the dense vegetation of the mind so to speak before arriving at the core.