Top 140 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Mountaineers

When you are totally defeated you begin again to enjoy the small things around you. Just going to the mountains, not for victory or glory, but to enjoy nature or enjoy fine people. If you always succeed you enjoy the admiration of many people. Being defeated means being limited to the basis existential choices of life. If you can enjoy the quiet evening hours it is beautiful; a hero who always succeeds may not have time to enjoy such things.

Modern man is conditioned to expect instant gratification, but any success or triumph realized quickly, with only marginal effort, is necessarily shallow. Meaningful achievement takes time, hard work, persistence, patience, proper intent and self-awareness. The path to success is punctuated by failure, consolidation, and renewed effort.

The summit is just a halfway point.

It cannot be too often repeated that it is not helps, but obstacles, not facilities, but difficulties that make men.

At its finest moments climbing allows me to step out of ordinary existence into something extraordinary, stripping me of my sense of self-importance.

If you're not living a life on the edge you're taking up too much space! ... You learn the most when you're out of your comfort zone!

In the time between the two wars, a British colonial officer said that with the invention of the airplane the world has no secrets left. However, he said, there is one last mystery. There is a large country on the Roof of the World, where strange things happen. There are monks who have the ability to separate mind from body, shamans and oracles who make government decisions, and a God-King who lives in a skyscraper-like palace in the Forbidden City of Llhasa.

How well does your experience of the sacred in nature enable you to cope more effectively with the problems of mankind when you come back to the city?

You never conquer a mountain. You just stand on the top a few moments. Then the wind blows your footprints away.

I wonder if one can view risk like a drug, beneficial to the organism in the proper dose. Too much or too little may be harmful.

There is probably nothing finer than to climb free and unencumbered by equipment, reveling in the gymnastic upward movement, like Preuss or a Dulfer before you, relying only upon yourself, keeping a sharp eye on things, feeling the rock beneath your feet and fingertips.

I look at climbing not so much as standing on the top as seeing the other side. There are always other horizons in front of you, other horizons to go beyond and that's what I like about climbing.

Climbers seem to forget that we said in our introduction that there were simply '50 classic routes', not 'the 50 classics'. We chose 50 from a list of about 120. Only a torturer will ever pry loose from our lips the names of those other 70 classics.

A person should have wings to carry them where their dreams go, but sometimes a pair of skis makes a good substitute.

There is something about the Himalayas not possessed by the Alps, something unseen and unknown, a charm that pervades every hour spent among them, a mystery intriguing and disturbing. Confronted by them, a man loses his grasp of ordinary things, perceiving himself as immortal, an entity capable of outdistancing all changes, all decay, all life, all death.

There are few treasures of more lasting worth than the experiences of a way of life that is in itself wholly satisfying. Such, after all, are the only possessions of which no fate, no cosmic catastrophe can deprive us; nothing can alter the fact if for one moment in eternity we have really lived.

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.

The stresses of high-altitude climbing reveal your true character; they unmask who you really are. You no longer have all the social graces to hide behind, to play roles. You are the essence of what you are.

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.

I have not conquered Everest, it has merely tolerated me

I've climbed with some of the best climbers in the world, more importantly, to me, they are some of the best people in the world. That's another reason why I climb.

I believe you can have discipline without fear. I believe that you can have a cohesive and inclusive band where students and parents feel welcome to express their concerns or opinions.

Without a rope there is no fear beacuse to fall is unthinkable.

I wouldn't last 30 minutes climbing solo.

C'est pas de l'alpinisme, ça, c'est la guerre.

I scavenged for sensation, sought myself in the rewards of being out there, across the Border.

I just have a dream mountain under the eyelids, this is my breath, my life.

You become what you do. How and what you become depends on environmental influence so you become who you hang around. Raise the standard your peers must meet and you'll raise your expectations of yourself. If your environment is not making you better, change it.

Women often focus more on staying friends, which is as important as climbing the mountain.

If you're going climbing with young people, you get very, very used to seeing your climbing partner as a tiny little dot.

Why climb? For the natural experience; for the danger that draws us ever on; for the feeling of total freedom; for the monstrous drop beneath you. It is like a drug.

In the end, to ski is to travel fast and free – free over untouched snow country. To be bound to one slope, even one mountain, by a lift may be convenient but it robs us of the greatest pleasure that skiing can give, that is to travel through the wide wintery country; to follow the lure of peaks which tempt on the horizon and to be alone for a few days or even hours in clear, mysterious surroundings.

The mountain decides whether you climb or not. The art of mountaineering is knowing when to go, when to stay, and when to retreat.

Beauty is the door to another world.

Proverbs should be sold in pairs, a single one being but a half truth.

The mountains are exceptional places for, as the natural environment is concerned, they are the concentration of the wildest possible variety of all natural phenomena and forms. They are somehow a concentration of the truth of nature or even I'd say its essence.

Early on May 23, 1997, from 28,500 feet on Everest, I witnessed the incredible shadow of the mountain, the penumbra, forming to the west as the sun rose behind me. The full moon from the night before was still visible. The bluish cast of the atmosphere can also be seen.

Er, I say, are you going to be able to get me out?

If you're ever killed mountain climbing, then all that you've worked for is gone

As long as you believe what you’re doing is meaningful, you can cut through fear and exhaustion and take the next step.

Phil Ershler is a world class climber and guide. Sue Ershler is a first class businesswoman. But their story is not just about climbing and business. It is about two people in love who switch leads in life’s hard climb. A great read—inside or outside a tent!

History may be accurate. But archaeology is precise.

Punish the body to perfect the soul.

You've climbed the highest mountain in the world. What's left ? It's all downhill from there. You've got to set your sights on something higher than Everest.

The first law of success is concentration - to bed all the energies to one point, and to go directly to that point, looking neither to the right nor the left.

We just lay on our bellies in the snow, gasping and immobile.

I soon learned that Everest wasn't a private affair. It belonged to many men.

Success can breed contempt, and a casual attitude toward danger.

What a man does is the real test of what a man is.

So powerfully does fortune appear to sway the destinies of men, putting a silver spoon into one man's mouth, and a wooden one into another's, that some of the most sagacious of men, as Cardinal Mazarin and Rothschild, seem to have been inclined to regard luck as the first element of worldly success; experience, sagacity, energy, and enterprise as nothing, if linked to an unlucky star.

Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.

We have a saying in Tibet: If a problem can be solved there is no use worrying about it. If it can't be solved, worrying will do no good.

I strode among giants, friends tell me now, though at the time I felt more like a misfit associating with oddballs.

You learn the most when you’re out on the edge.

The man coming back from the hard mountain trip is a wiser being, calmer and radiating inside. I'd say momentary liberated.

Frostbite? I consider that a failure.

In dire times of survival it's not uncommon for people to turn to their faith and that was also true for the men on the oil tanker Pendleton, which was cut in half by 60-foot waves during the hurricane.

When Shana Alexander interviewed me for Life magazine in 1952, she gave up after 4,000. At one time or another, I've worked for every studio in Hollywood, for almost every director with most of the actors and actresses.

Whenever a climber leaves the known paths, he enters an area without rules or routines... The only advice comes from deep inside the self.

Crested Butte is for spectators; Chamonix is for participants.