Yossi Ghinsberg

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

“Sometimes experience is an obstacle because you cast your future based on your past experience.”

“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 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.”

“Did I pray for death? I did one time. I wanted to die so badly. And I didn't want to die. I wanted to rest, you know. And I knew the only rest I would find is in death.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 was young, out of the military service in Israel. I was looking for a big adventure, and I was searching for it.”

“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.”

“Survival is very powerful. All your faculties want to cling to life. We're not tested usually, luckily, but when we are, we become superheroes.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”