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.
I urge individuals around the world to stand up, and ask local leaders, if they haven't already, to pledge to purchase cleaner cars, build green facilities, and buy green power like wind or solar energy. Our actions may determine if we become a casualty in the war for a habitable planet for generations to come.
As a people, we have the problem of making our forests outlast this generation, or iron outlast this century, and our coal the next; not merely as a matter of convenience or comfort, but as a matter of stern necessity.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older.
The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. Itβs as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.
With its array of gadgets and machines, all powered by energies that are destructive of land or air or water, and connected to work, market, school, recreation, etc., by gasoline engines, the modern home is a veritable factory of waste and destruction. It is the mainstay of the economy of money. But within the economies of energy and nature, it is a catastrophe. It takes in the world's goods and converts them into garbage, sewage, and noxious fumes-for none of which have we found a use.
We tend to block off many of our senses when we're staring at a screen. Nature time can literally bring us to our senses.
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