Quotes on Climbers

Ever since the morning of May 29, 1953, when Tenzing Norgay and I became the first climbers to step onto the summit of Mount Everest, I've been called a great adventurer.

The experienced mountain climber is not intimidated by a mountain - he is inspired by it.

The reason it was so scary was that there was only one climber capable of rescuing us, and that was Layton Kor, and he was in Colorado.

My ambition was to become the best climber and I never did. I think that goal was a wrong goal. A better one is to put more emphasis on enjoyment and on getting a rounded experience and on things like friendship, rather than on sheer achievement.

Climbing for speed records will probably become more popular, a mania which has just begun. Climbers climb not just to see how fast and efficiently they can do it, but far worse, to see how much faster and more efficiently they are than a party which did the same climb a few days before. The climb becomes secondary, no more important than a racetrack. Man is pitted against man.

In climbing, having confidence in your partners is no small concern. One climber's actions can affect the welfare of the entire team.

The best climbers no longer go to the 8000ers, but to the most difficult mountains in the world which are 6000 or 7000-meter-peaks. There they find any kind of playground. But it is a pity that the really good climbers have fewer opportunities to finance their expeditions because so much attention is taken away by the Everest tourists.

Climbers are a universal tribe: we share the knowledge that things are not important. Experience is important. Feeling is important.

There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

But we are all insane, anyway. Note the mountain-climbers.

Climbing is not a battle with the elements, nor against the law of gravity. It's a battle against oneself.

When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the 'nay' in your own mind, nor do you withhold the 'ay. And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart; For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed. When you part from your friend, you grieve not; For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

There's no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing

There's no such thing as bad weather - only the wrong clothes.

This forms the nub of a dilemna that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you're too driven you're likely to die.

I wonder if it's like this for mountain climbers, he thought. You climb bigger and bigger mountains and you know that one day one of them is going to be just that bit too steep. But you go on doing it, because it’s so-o good when you breathe the air up there. And you know you'll die falling.

When you part from your friend, you grieve not; For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

Most climbers aren't in fact deranged, they're just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.