Quotes About Mountaineering

#1. Classic mountaineering grows out of a traditional romantic imagination. Its heart is the feeling, its path is blood, sweat and tears, and its restriction is God.

Wojciech Kurtyka

#2. There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.

Ernest Hemingway,

#3. We cannot overlook the importance of wild country as source of inspiration, to which we give expression in writing, in poetry, drawing and painting, in mountaineering, or in just being there.

Olaus Murie

#4. Like an entirely cloudless sky when one is going mountaineering ...

Marcel Proust

#5. As time went on, I did campaign to lighten the character a little bit, to introduce some romance into the episodes, outside activities, horse riding and fencing and mountaineering.

Patrick Stewart

#6. Rob Hall was, without doubt, the most competent guide in mountaineering.

Jon Krakauer

#7. In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.

John Muir

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

Ed Viesturs

#9. In a civilization of wage slaves, where people seek to survive more than to live, mountaineering is an enigma.

Erhard Loretan; Jean Amman

#10. I think there are so many activities going on, like mountaineering. You know, you would pay good money not to have to do that, and yet there are people racing out who want to spend their spare time clambering up rocks.

John Cleese

#11. But this, perhaps, is the enduring lesson of mountaineering: once we've hit our target we are but halfway. Soldier on.

Sebastian Marshall

#12. [In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.

Rebecca Solnit

#13. Nothing to mountaineering, just a little physical endurance, a good deal of brains, lots of practice, and plenty of warm clothing.

Annie Smith Peck

#14. Mountaineering is one of the most difficult sports - we are away from routine life for days, living in tents, and it requires high degree of physical and mental strength.

Samina Baig

#15. The Sherpas play a very important role in most mountaineering expeditions, and in fact many of them lead along the ridges and up to the summit.

Edmund Hillary

#16. This was my introduction to mountaineering, and clumsy indeed were my movements as we moved off.

Jan Morris

#17. I really haven't liked the commercialization of mountaineering, particularly of Mt. Everest. By paying $65,000, you can be conducted to the summit by a couple of good guides.

Edmund Hillary

#18. There is no single, correct objective in mountaineering; there are only possibilities. One of them leads beyond the impossible.
- Reinhold Messner

Bernadette McDonald

#19. I like to think of Everest as a great mountaineering challenge, and when you've got people just streaming up the mountain - well, many of them are just climbing it to get their name in the paper, really.

Edmund Hillary

#20. Life's a bit like mountaineering - never look down.

Edmund Hillary

#21. For me, making films is like being on vacation, it's a nice walk. But theatre is like mountaineering. You never know whether you're going to fall off or make it to the top.

Isabelle Huppert

#22. Mountaineering has always been a huge hobby of mine.

Andy Serkis

#23. My mountaineering skills are not important to my best photographs, but they do add a component to my work that is definitely a bit different than that of most photographers.

Galen Rowell

#24. Inner harmony is the prerequisite for any climber who seeks to push the frontiers; without it he should give up extreme mountaineering.
-Reinhold Messner

Bernadette McDonald

#25. Like it or not taking risks, by a total commitment to the mountain and the vagaries of the weather, is essential for the greater satisfaction to be derived from mountaineering.

Doug Scott

#26. The roller-coaster is my life; life is a fast, dizzying game; life is a parachute jump; it's taking chances, falling over and getting up again; it's mountaineering; it's wanting to get to the very top of yourself and feeling angry and dissatisfied when you don't manage it

Paulo Coelho

#27. Mountaineering is a relentless pursuit. One climbs further and further yet never reaches the destination. Perhaps that is what gives it its own particular charm. One is constantly searching for something never to be found.

Hermann Buhl

#28. If we successful, we will enter into the history of mountaineering, we will have the opportunity to its success to sacrifice our colleagues.

Jerzy Kukuczka

#29. mountaineering offers you a chance to learn about yourself by venturing beyond the confines of the modern world.

Ron Eng

#30. Difficult struggle in mountaineering is our rise above himself, is the voice of freedom.

Wojciech Kurtyka

#31. In no other pursuit is the best or the worst in a man brought out as in mountaineering. An old friend of civilization may be a useless companion on a mountain.

Frank Smythe

#32. Climbing has taught me many lessons, one of the most important being, just how ever-present death is. Having faced death a few times now while climbing, has made me realize that I have no fear of it.

Mekael Shane

#33. Pucky lads, a wee bit over their heads.

Doug Scott

#34. As one veteran Russian pilot dryly told me:We have to be very careful flying in the clouds. Around here they are full of rocks.

Alan Hinkes

#35. What counts are merely the experiences one gains along the way.
-Reinhold Messner

Bernadette McDonald

#36. ... I only know that when physical and emotional reserves remain unchallenged, this feeds the spiritual cancer of a life unfulfilled.
-Reinhold Messner

Bernadette McDonald

#37. A healthy person that uses medical oxygen to perform their job on a daily basis should expect to eventually become a sick person.

Steven Magee

#38. The fact that I am still alive, when so many friends and others climbing the 8000ers have died is humbling ... It is only death that has stopped many mountaineers from achieving the full tally of 14.

Alan Hinkes

#39. There was a shepherd the other day up at Findon Fair who had come from the east by Lewes with sheep, and who had in his eyes that reminiscence of horizons which makes the eyes of shepherds and of mountaineers different from the eyes of other men.

Hilaire Belloc

#40. It's a tough lesson: There is no summit that comes before you expect it.

Mark Obmascik

#41. The altimeter had been damaged along the way, but the few bottles that we brought along to wash down the ordinary expedition rations were fine. True, a bottle gives only a vague indication of altitude, but can you drink an altimeter?

Erhard Loretan

#42. ... one of the most decisive factors enduring a borderline situation is the WILL TO SURVIVE.
-Reinhold Messner

Bernadette McDonald

#43. To be a climber one has to accept that gratification is rarely immediate.

Bernadette McDonald

#44. Keeping in mind the old mountain adage that the longer you take to set up your bivy site, the shorter the bivy you have to endure, we ended up taking two hours to dig the snow cave.

Erhard Loretan

#45. It is said that a man is rejuvenated every seven years- that all his cells are replaced. I wonder, does that also apply to his spirit?
- Reinhold Messner

Bernadette McDonald

#46. My mind is in a state of constant rebellion. I believe that will always be so.

George Mallory

#47. It's not dying that is the problem, he said. 'Climbing is like a lover, and your wife knows this. Whenever you are together, no matter how much you love your family, your thoughts are only of your lover, of climbing.

Andy Kirkpatrick

#48. The unknown is so inflammatory to the imagination because it is an imaginatively malleable space: a projection-screen onto which a culture or an individual can throw their fears and their aspirations. Like Echo's cave, the unknown will answer back with whatever you shout at it.

Robert Macfarlane

#49. I like the mountains because they make me feel small,' Jeff says. 'They help me sort out what's important in life.

Mark Obmascik

#50. For the stone from the top for geologists, the knowledge of the limits of endurance for the doctors, but above all for the spirit of adventure to keep alive the soul of man.

George Mallory

#51. All my life, I have never felt as happy on Earth as when I'm getting closer to the sky.

Erhard Loretan

#52. I assure you it's harder to battle human stupidity than to do battle with mountains. Mountains, after all, have holds.

Erhard Loretan

#53. Mountaineers are one of the few groups to celebrate before the finish line. More mountaineers die on the descent than on the ascent.

Susan Oakey-Baker

#54. A failed attempt on a virgin face of an eight thousander gives me much more than the successful ascent of a known route.

Bernadette McDonald

#55. Chasing angels or fleeing demons, go to the mountains.

Jeffrey Rasley

#56. Profound silence would brood over the valley, even weighing down our spirits with indefinable heaviness. There can be no other place in the world where man feels himself so alone, so isolated, so completely ignored by nature, so incapable of entering into communion with her

David Oliver Relin

#57. hI was following through on the mountain commitment from my younger days, and it's always a nice surprise when the newly minted adult doesn't disown the child he once was.

Erhard Loretan

#58. Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.

Robert Macfarlane

#59. John Wayne never wore Lycra.

Ron Kauk

#60. They say you can't do it, but sometimes it doesn't always work.

Casey Stengel

#61. Only secrets can be conquered'- most of all the secrets that lie within ourselves.

Bernadette McDonald

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

Eric Shipton

#63. K2 is not some malevolent being, lurking there above the Baltoro, waiting to get us. It's just there. It's indifferent. It's an inanimate mountain made of rock, ice, and snow. The "savageness" is what we project onto it, as if we blame the peak for our own misadventures on it.

Ed Viesturs

#64. The rope connecting two men on a mountain is more than nylon protection; it is an organic thing that transmits subtle messages of intent and disposition from man to man; it is an extension of the tactile senses, a psychological bond, a wire along which currents of communication flow.

Trevanian

#65. He (Tomaz Humar) doesn't conform to existing standards; he creates them.

Bernadette McDonald

#66. ... where mountains are sacred & where risk & death are constant companions- the Himalayas.

Bernadette McDonald

#67. Because it's there.

George Mallory

#68. too young to live, too old to die

Jeffrey Rasley

#69. Working on the summit of Mauna Kea was comparable to working on the hospital pulmonary ward with sick people sucking on oxygen cylinders.

Steven Magee

#70. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Page No. 31, Freedom Climbers

Rainer Maria Rilke

#71. Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.

Ed Viesturs

#72. He wasn't a great man, but he had a great life.

Jeffrey Rasley