Life is about daring to carry out your ideas. And for me, it always comes back to the wilderness, nature, mountains.
Interpretation
Life requires courage to pursue your ideas, often inspired by the beauty of nature.
This quote emphasizes that living fully involves taking risks and being bold in following your ideas and dreams. Reinhold Messner highlights the significance of nature, particularly the wilderness and mountains, as a source of inspiration and a metaphor for the adventurous spirit needed to bring one's ideas to life.
In practice
Using this quote during a motivational talk about following your dreams.
I became famous for the fact that I would break many, many limits. People said, 'He does all these crazy things.' But oddly it was a crazy thing only because scientists and climbers said, 'Everest and the 8,000-meter peaks without oxygen - impossible. Messner is becoming sick in his head.'
A 30-year-old rock climber is an old man. At 40, one is in the middle of his high-altitude power. At 50, a crosser of deserts is at his best age. But at 60, each of us is out of the game.
I think my cultural work is more important than the adventures I did. The adventures are not important for human beings. It's the conquering of the useless.
In mountaineering, there is not only the activity, but the philosophy behind it. Some say a moral, but I am against that because all morality is dangerous.
I was the first man to climb the world's 14 tallest peaks without supplementary oxygen, but I never asked how high I would go, just how I would do it.
In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits.
The Cicada sing an endless song in the long grass, smells run along the earth and falling stars run over the sky, like tears over a cheek. You are the privileged person to whom everything is taken. The Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts.
For this lovely bowl let us arrange these flowers since there is no rice.
Nature is slow, but sure; she works no faster than need be; she is the tortoise that wins the race by her perseverance.
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home'. It is all these things but one thing - it is never dull.
If you manage to stop the timber industry from cutting this forest, they'll cut that forest. If you stop oil drilling here, they'll go drill there.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.