Climbing Quotes

“The harder you fall, the heavier your heart; the heavier your heart, the stronger you climb; the stronger you climb, the higher your pedestal.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Every mountain top is within reach if you just keep climbing.”
― Barry Finlay, Kilimanjaro and Beyond

“Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.”
― Robert MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit

“People ask me, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is of no use.'There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron... If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.”
― George Mallory, Climbing Everest: The Complete Writings of George Mallory

“Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.”
― Ed Viesturs, No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World's 14 Highest Peaks

“Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.”
― Edward Whymper, Scrambles Amongst the Alps

“Because it's there.”
― George Mallory

“I like the mountains because they make me feel small,' Jeff says. 'They help me sort out what's important in life.”
― Mark Obmascik, Halfway to Heaven: My White-knuckled--and Knuckleheaded--Quest for the Rocky Mountain High

“Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“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.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“How to get the best of it all? One must conquer, achieve, get to the top; one must know the end to be convinced that one can win the end - to know there's no dream that mustn't be dared. . . Is this the summit, crowning the day? How cool and quiet! We're not exultant; but delighted, joyful; soberly astonished. . . Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves. Have we gained success? That word means nothing here. Have we won a kingdom? No. . . and yes. We have achieved an ultimate satisfaction. . . fulfilled a destiny. . . To struggle and to understand - never this last without the other; such is the law. . .”
― George Mallory, Climbing Everest: The Complete Writings of George Mallory

“For the stone from the top for geologists, the knowledge of the limits of endurance for the doctors, but above all for the spirit of adventure to keep alive the soul of man.”
― George Mallory

“...just the bare bones of a name, all rock and ice and storm and abyss. It makes no attempt to sound human. It is atoms and stars. It has the nakedness of the world before the first man – or of the cindered planet after the last”
― Fosco Maraini, Secret Tibet

“Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.”
― Alain de Botton

“For a climber, saying that you are stopping by Everest is like saying that you are stopping by to see God.”
― Roland Smith, Peak

“You looked strange climbing in the tree like that."
Tiger Lily pulled her braids between her fingers, her sudden self-consciousness feeling foreign and strange to her.
"I didn't do it to look nice," she said.
"But you do care."
Tiger Lily studied the tree and decided if she did care, she would now choose not to. "I don't," she said.
"All girls do," he added, pushing the point.
"You must not know many girls."
"I know a million," Peter said, dark and serious. There was a long awkward silence, but if Peter regretted his words, I couldn't tell.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“STRAUSS:Have you ever thought about putting those experiences into a book?
RICHIE:I did decide to write about what i experienced in climbing to the top. And finally when I got there, I discovered what was at the top.You know what was there?
STRAUSS: No, I don't.
RICHIE: Nothing. Not one thing. What was at the top was all the experiences that you had to get there.”
― Neil Strauss

“So he bought tickets to the Greyhound and they climbed, painfully, inch by inch and with the knowledge that, once they reached the top, there would be one breath-taking moment when the car would tip precariously into space, over an incline six stories steep and then plunge, like a plunging plane. She buried her head against him, fearing to look at the park spread below. He forced himself to look: thousands of little people and hundreds of bright little stands, and over it all the coal-smoke pall of the river factories and railroad yards. He saw in that moment the whole dim-lit city on the last night of summer; the troubled streets that led to the abandoned beaches, the for-rent signs above overnight hotels and furnished basement rooms, moving trolleys and rising bridges: the cagework city, beneath a coalsmoke sky.”
― Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning

“During my three seasons at Mount Rainier I learned a lot about mountain climbing and rescues, about politics and camaraderie in the mountains, and about what being a woman climber means. Now I know in all certainty when to bring my toothbrush and when to leave it at home, and, all things considered, that kind of confidence is hard to come by. The greatest skill I ever had, though, was the one I started with: being able to suffer for long periods of time and not die. In exchange, I got to see some amazing things.”
― Bree Loewen, Pickets and Dead Men: Seasons on Rainier

“Another day I walked out of town to do a bit of climbing in the mountains behind the airport. I scrambled up and down slopes that contained some of the oldest rocks in the world, isotope-dated at 3,800 billion years, remnants, so the geological rumor goes, of the earth's earliest terrestrial crust.”
― Lawrence Millman, Last Places: A Journey in the North

“One never can know enough about snow.”
― Charles Granville Bruce, The Assault on Mount Everest 1922

“The Edge by Stewart Stafford

Hanging on the jagged edge,
Taunted to plunge in the deep,
Surfing wild on stormy winds,
Cold sweat at pain's brief sweep.

Nestled in some whirling gusts,
Gooseflesh skin from chilly hands,
A mask for a mimicry ball,
An everyman's muddled land.

Rising from some inner call,
Not a fugazi in Kismet's window.
The path still fogged from sight,
I climb higher, to touch the rainbow.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“For Sherpas here, the land is everything. Losing two of our most brute, bold men within the first week reminds me that Everest is a spirit to be honored, not a peak to conquer.

I've been asking myself if I'm strong enough to keep up, to make it to the top, but maybe that's the wrong question. Maybe I should be asking if I'm soft enough to listen. To yield. To trust something deep inside, something in my bloodline, my heritage, that undercuts logic and strength.”
― Silvia Vasquez-Lavado, In the Shadow of the Mountain

“Even while recuperating, we have to keep active. If you don't move at all, you're more likely to get sick. Continuous motion is the best way to manipulate our bodies into believing that we can fully operate with limited oxygen.”
― Silvia Vasquez-Lavado, In the Shadow of the Mountain

“You'll have an awful day, if not many, on this mountain,' he said. 'You'll want to quit; you'll question why you're here. But when that happens, know that it's just an awful day and that everything will be different when you wake up the next morning. Everything changes when you just keep going.”
― Silvia Vasquez-Lavado, In the Shadow of the Mountain

“You'll never feel the joy of movement if you're struggling.”
― Jon Krakauer, Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains

“One minute it represents the pinnacle of gregarious engineering, the most refined Apollonian mechanism of social regulation; the next it’s a groping homunculus spewing pus and other people’s blood onto the last remnants of a massacred autonomy.”
― Sebastián Martínez Daniell, Two Sherpas

“वो शिखर पे नहीं, चरम पे है | – He is not at the top, but at extremes.”
― pankaj lagwal

“You messed up, Pete'
'Peak,' I said
'Weird name'
'Weird parents”
― Roland Smith, Peak

“Discovering the strength within yourself that propels you to the top is the true meaning of climbing Lobuche Peak.”
― brightvibes