Quotes on Mountain Climbing

You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.

To put yourself into a situation where a mistake cannot necessarily be recouped, where the life you lose may be your own, clears the head wonderfully. It puts domestic problems back into proportion and adds an element of seriousness to your drab, routine life. Perhaps this is one reason why climbing has become increasingly hard as society has become increasingly, disproportionately, coddling.

I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me: and to me High mountains are a feeling, but the hum of human cities torture.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet.

A few hours of mountain climbing make a blackguard and a saint two rather similar creatures.

When you have worn out yourshoes, the strength of the shoe leather has passed into the fiber ofyour body. I measure your health by the number of shoes and hats andclothes you have worn out.

Somewhere between the bottom of the climb and the summit is the answer to the mystery why we climb.

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

For us the mountains had been a natural field of activity where, playing on the frontiers of life and death, we had found the freedom for which we were blindly groping and which was as necessary to us as bread.

Mountains are not fair or unfair, they are just dangerous.

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.

No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied - it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.

After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.

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

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

I climb upon the highest mountains, laughing at all tragedies - whether real or imaginary.

I thought climbing the Devil's Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe.

It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.