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.
Interpretation
The quote conveys a sense of transcending the self to experience a profound connection with the world.
Reinhold Messner's quote reflects a state of spiritual elevation where the individual feels detached from their own identity and perceptions. This radical abstraction suggests that in this elevated state, one becomes more of an observer, absorbed in the larger essence of existence, symbolized by the image of a gasping lung floating above the world. It speaks to the concept of losing oneself in the beauty and complexity of nature and life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about finding inner peace and connection with nature.
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.
I go to the mountains for an adventure and each time I pray I will get up and down again.
How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth?
[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.
Freedom is not the right to do what we want, but what we ought
Truth is in things, and not in words.
It's the end game that people dread and that's what I'm scared of
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