"One does not climb to attain enlightenment, rather one climbs because he is enlightened." — Zen Master Futomaki.
"Doubly happy, however, is the man to whom lofty mountain tops are within reach." — John Muir.
"Climbing is one of the few sports in which the arena (the cliffs, the mountains and their specific routes) acquire a notoriety that outpopulates, outshines and outlives the actual athletes." — Jonathan Waterman.
"I don't think I would become a climber if I were young man now [...] What is freedom to a bird if it is in the middle of a flock ?" — John Gill.
"Climbing is not a spectator sport." — Mark Wellman.
"Montani semper liberi." — Motto for the state of West Virginia.
"Mountains are not fair or unfair, they are just dangerous." — Reinhold Messner.
"There is no place comparable to the Diamond [up Colorado's Longs Peak]. It is high, cold, steep, a long way from the parking lot, and most of all, intimidating. Chasm View, or the Flying Buttress can get you acclimated, but nothing can prepare you for the Diamond but the Diamond." — Malcolm Daly.
"What one leads on-sight, in good, strong style, safely, is what one's ability is." — Pat Ament.
"What one leads on-sight, in good, strong style, safely, is what one's ability is." — Pat Ament.
"Remember that time spent on a rock climb isn't subtracted from your life span." — Will Niccolls.
"Pucky lads, a wee bit over their heads." — Doug Scott after encountering two climbers on Denali suffering from exposure.
"I send my warmest congratulations to you and to the other members of the Italian team, who have achieved such a splendid mountaineering feat on Mt McKinley." — President Kennedy to Riccardo Cassin in 1961.
"It's a round trip. Getting to the summit is optional, getting down is mandatory." — Ed Viesturs.
"Take only pictures; leave only footprints."
"It's a wonderful feeling to push even a tiny piece of the planet down beneath one's feet. If it's overhanging plastic, it's going to pump your arms like bloated sausages; if it's a steep snow-slope at 27000 feet it's going to deaden the legs and make the lungs like overworked bellows. Either way, the challenges are obvious." — Adrian Burgess.
"It's always further than it looks.
It's always taller than it looks.
And it's always harder than it looks." — The 3 rules of mountaineering.
It's always taller than it looks.
And it's always harder than it looks." — The 3 rules of mountaineering.
"In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock." — Edward Abbey.
"You never climb the same mountain twice, not even in memory. Memory rebuilds the mountain, changes the weather, retells the jokes, remakes all the moves." — Lito Tejada-Flores.
"There have been joys too great to be described in words, and there have been griefs upon which I have not dared to dwell, and with these in mind I say, climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are naught without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste, look well to each step, and from the beginning think what may be the end." — Edward Whymper.
"The aim of the mountaineer, if he wishes to be an artist in the full sense of word, is neither escape nor "the search for the absolute" as some have claimed, but rather seek that place where "the mystic remains silent and the poets start to speak towards men." — Bernard Amy.
"Somewhere between the bottom of the climb and the summit is the answer to the mystery why we climb." — Greg Child.
"In a sense everything that is exists to climb. All evolution is a climbing towards a higher form. Climbing for life as it reaches towards the consciousness, towards the spirit. We have always honored the high places because we sense them to be the homes of gods. In the mountains there is the promise of... something unexplainable. A higher place of awareness, a spirit that soars. So we climb... and in climbing there is more than a metaphor; there is a means of discovery." — Rob Parker.
"A wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountain top."
"Climbing is as close as we can come to flying." — Margaret Young, aviator and alpinist.
"On this proud and beautiful mountain we have lived hours of fraternal, warm and exalting nobility. Here for a few days we have ceased to be slaves and have really been men. It is hard to return to servitude." — Lionel Terray.
"How could the adventure seeker of today find satisfaction with the level of performance that was a standard set more than 40 years ago ?" — Anatoli Boukreev.
"Mountains have a way of dealing with overconfidence." — Hermann Buhl.
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment." — Evan Hardin.
"In the mountains there are only two grades: You can either do it, or you can't." — Rusty Baille.
"Many climbers become writers because of the misconceptions about climbing." — Jonathan Waterman.
"If adventure has a final and all-embracing motive, it is surely this: we go out because it is our nature to go out, to climb mountains, and to paddle rivers, to fly to the planets and plunge into the depths of the oceans... When man ceases to do these things, he is no longer man." — Wilfrid Noyce.
"Eastward the dawn rose, ridge behind ridge into the morning, and vanished out of eyesight into guess; it was no more than a glimmer blending with the hem of the sky, but it spoke to them, out of the memory and old tales, of the high and distant mountains." — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of The Rings.
"One cannot climb at all unless he has sufficient urge to do so. Danger must be met (indeed it must be used) to an extent beyond that incurred to normal life. That is one reason men climb; for only in response to challenge does one man becomes his best." — Ax Nelson.
"To the sober person adventurous conduct often seems insanity." — Georg Simmel.
"Desire is just a part — the cracking ice, the splitting rock
Hey, hey I listen to you pray as if some help will come..." — Lyrics from White Coats by New Model Army.
"Desire is just a part — the cracking ice, the splitting rock
Hey, hey I listen to you pray as if some help will come..." — Lyrics from White Coats by New Model Army.
"Heaven sent and hell bent over the mountain tops we go !" — Lyrics from Sweet Bird of Truth by The The.
"We do not deceive ourselves that we are engaging in an activity that is anything but debilitating, dangerous, euphoric, kinesthetic, expensive, frivolously essential, economically useless and totally without redeeming social significance. One should not probe for deeper meanings." — Allen Steck, 1967.
"You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place ? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know." — René Daumal.
"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as the sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms teir energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves." — John Muir about Yosemite.
"To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully. It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life. Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling." — A. Alvarez, The Games Climbers Play.
"The bizarre trend in mountaineers is not the risk they take, but the large degree to which they value life. They are not crazy because they don't dare, they're crazy because they do. These people tend to enjoy life to the fullest, laugh the hardest, travel the most, and work the least." — Lisa Morgan.
"The pleasure of risk is in the control needed to ride it with assurance so that what appears dangerous to the outsider is, to the participant, simply a matter of intelligence, skill, intuition, coordination... in a word, experience. Climbing in particular, is a paradoxically intellectual pastime, but with this difference: you have to think with your body. Every move has to be worked out in terms of playing chess with your body. If I make a mistake the consequences are immediate, obvious, embarrassing, and possibly painful. For a brief period I am directly responsible for my actions. In that beautiful, silent, world of mountains, it seems to me worth a little risk." — A. Alvarez.
"If the conquest of a great peak brings moments of exultation and bliss, which in the monotonous, materialistic existence of modern times nothing else can approach, it also presents great dangers. It is not the goal of grand alpinism to face peril, but it is one of the tests one must undergo to deserve the joy of rising for an instant above the state of crawling grubs. But soon we have to start the descent. Suddenly I feel sad and despondent. I am well aware that a mountaineering victory is only a scratch in space But in spite of this, how sad I feel at leaving that crest ! On this proud and beautiful mountain we have lived hours of fraternal, warm and exalting nobility. Here for a few days we have ceased to be slaves and have really been men. It is hard to return to servitude." — Lionel Terray.
"If the conquest of a great peak brings moments of exultation and bliss, which in the monotonous, materialistic existence of modern times nothing else can approach, it also presents great dangers. It is not the goal of grand alpinism to face peril, but it is one of the tests one must undergo to deserve the joy of rising for an instant above the state of crawling grubs. But soon we have to start the descent. Suddenly I feel sad and despondent. I am well aware that a mountaineering victory is only a scratch in space But in spite of this, how sad I feel at leaving that crest ! On this proud and beautiful mountain we have lived hours of fraternal, warm and exalting nobility. Here for a few days we have ceased to be slaves and have really been men. It is hard to return to servitude." — Lionel Terray.
"I believe that the ascent of mountains forms an essential chapter in the complete duty of man, and that it is wrong to leave any district without setting foot on its highest peak." — Sir Leslie Stephen.
"Consider what you want to do in relation to what you are capable of doing. Climbing is, above all, a matter of integrity." — Gaston Rébuffat (1921—1985).
"Some mountaineers are proud of having done all their climbs without bivouac. How much they have missed ! And the same applies to those who enjoy only rock climbing, or only the ice climbs, onyl the ridges or faces. We should refuse none of the thousands and one joys that the mountains offer us at every turn. We should brush nothing aside, set no restrictions. We should experience hunger and thirst, be able to go fast, but also to go slowly and to contemplate." — Gaston Rébuffat (1921—1985).
"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go." — T. S. Eliot.
"Each fresh peak ascended teaches something." — Sir Martin Convay
"For us the mountains had been a natural field of activity where, playing on the frontiers of life and death, we had found the freedom for which we were blindly groping and which was as necessary to us as bread." — Maurice Herzog, mountaineer and writer
"The world is a better place to live in because it contains human beings who will give up ease and security in order to do what they themselves think worth doing. They do the useless, brave, noble, divinely foolish, and the very wisest things that are done by Man. And what they prove to themselves and to others is that Man is no mere creature of his habits, no automaton in his routine, but that in the dust of which he is made there is also fire, lighted now and then by great winds from the sky." — Walter Lippmann, journalist.
"The events of the past day have proven to me that I am wholly alive, and that no matter what transpires from here on in, I have truly lived." — Anonymous climber.
"Like a drop of water falls from the summit, that's the line I shall take." — E. Comici.
"What is hard to endure is sweet to remember."
"When the going gets tough, the tough get going." — Old saying.
"Pain is only weakness leaving the body." — Tom Muccia.
"One can't take a breath large enough to last a lifetime ; one can't eat a meal big enough so that one never needs to eat again. Similarly, I don't think any climb can make you content never to climb again." — Woodrow Wilson Sayre.
"Be careful down there on Earth. It's close to the ground and somebody could get hurt." — Mir Crew.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out where the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with dust and sweat and blood. At best, he knows the triumph of high achievement; if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." — Theodore Roosevelt.
"Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out — it's the grain of sand in your shoe." — Robert Service (1874—1958).
"I feel that my enemy is anyone who would, given the power to do so, restrict individual liberty, and this includes all officials, law officers, army sergeants, communists, catholics and the house of Un-American Activities Committee. Of course I'm prejudiced, but I cannot imagine a sport other than climbing which offers such a complete and fulfilling expression of individuality. And I will not give it up nor even slow down, not for man, nor woman, nor wife, nor God." — Chuck Pratt, 1965.
"I refuse to believe in a risk free society where the thrill of living is traded for the safety of existence."
"If in normal conditions it is skill, which counts, in such extreme situations, it is the spirit, which saves." — Walter Bonatti.
"Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent." — Marilyn vos Savant.
"The breakfast of champions is not cereal, it's the opposition." — Nick Seitz.
"A sport is advanced by the handful of people who do it brilliantly, but it is kept sweet and sane by the great numbers of the mediocre, who do it for fun." — Elizabeth Coxhead.
"I have noticed that youngsters given to the climbing habit usually do something when they grow up" — Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), American editor, publisher and writer.
"Tomorrow ? Probably back on the ground involved in other struggles more dangerous than loose flakes, more demanding than commitment to a desert wall. Dealing with man can be less than beautiful. Climbing is beautiful." — Bill Forrest, the secret passage route
"Today is your day ! Your mountain is waiting. So... get on your way." — Dr. Seuss (1904—1991)
"To live for some future goal is shallow. It is the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top." — Robert Pirsig.
"The mountain is nothing without people on it. Often you part expedition exasperated, but a year or two later you go back with the same partners knowing there's potential in this human relationship." — Greg Child
"The true object, as always, is not simply to get up things and check them off in our guidebook — it is to challenge ourselves." — Doug Robinson
"In climbing you are always faced with new problems in which you must perform using intuitive movements, and then later analyze them to figure out why they work, and then learn from them." — Wolfgang Gullich
"The mountains have rules. they are harsh rules, but they are there, and if you keep to them you are safe. A mountain is not like men. A mountain is sincere. The weapons to conquer it exist inside you, inside your soul." — Walter Bonatti
"Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence — the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes — all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose by the seriousness of the task at hand." — Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
"Near the foot of the mountain we visited a yogi who dwelled in a hollow tunneled beneath a boulder. He pondered our notion of climbing Shivling and said: 'First travel, then struggle, finally calm'." — Greg Child
"To those who have struggled with them, the mountains reveal beauties that they will not disclose to those who make no effort. That is the reward the mountains give to effort. And it is because they have so much to give and give it so lavishly to those who will wrestle with them that men love the mountains and go back to them again and again. The mountains reserve their choice gifts for those who stand upon their summits." — Sir Francis Younghusband
"In this short span between my fingertips and the smooth edge and these tense feet cramped to a crystal ledge, I hold the life of a man." — Geoffrey Winthrop Young
"Only last week I murdered a rock, injured a stone and hospitalized a brick." — Muhammad Ali.
"One who's poised on the edge of a cliff is wise to define progress as a step backward." — The fate of all life on Earth
"Tell them I'm making Roosevelt's glasses out of the most precious thing on Earth: Imagination." — Gutzon Borglum, sculptor of Mt Rushmore
"The thought of approaching action aroused strange and contradictory emotions in me. I felt an immense pity for all the little men who toiled on in the prison which society has succeeded in building against the open sky, who knew nothing and felt nothing of what I knew and felt at that moment. Yesterday I was like them, and in another few days I would be like them again. But today I was a prisoner set free; and tomorrow I would be a lord and master, and commander of life and death, of the stars and the elements." — Giusto Gervasutti
