Passion for the high mountains requires some measure of poetic imagination, a love of beauty for its own sake and the appreciation of achievement totally unrelated to any tangible rewards.
Arthur Oliver Wheeler
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There are moments when one feels free from one's own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only Being.
Albert Einstein
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I really suffered today but the quality of the suffering was good.
Dan Pate
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Climbing is a sport that requires you to be fit, mentally in control, a team player, patient and accepting of failure.
Alan Arnette on summitpost.org
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So, Why?
Is the answer to reach the ever-higher altitudes on earth ? Or is climbing simply a way of seeing how far you can take yourself ? The brutal honesty it forces ? The clear understanding of the consequences ? The bonds developed when life is simplified ? The insight that personal growth is accelerated when you push ? Or is it just ... because ?
Alan Arnette on summitpost.org
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Three things they all had in common : faith in themselves, great determination and endurance.
Walt Unsworth
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Une expédition qui ne peut s'organiser sur une feuille de papier à lettre ordinaire [...] souffre d'un excès d'organisation .
Harold William Tilman
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Come forth into the light of things. Let Nature be your teacher.
Wordsworth
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Whatever you can do or dream, begin it ! Boldness has genius and power in it.
Goethe
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Play for more you can afford to loose, then you will learn the game.
W. Churchill
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For the sake of bodily exercise and the delight of the spirit.
Conrad Gesner
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Living with the immediacy of death helps you sort out your priorities in life. It helps you to live a less trivial life.
Sogyal Rinpoche
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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.
A. Alvarez
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Fear... the right and necessary counterweights to that courage which urges men skyward, and protects them from self-destruction.
Heinrich Harrer
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We took risks. We knew we took them. Things have come out against us. We have no cause for complaint.
Scott, found in his diary after the party froze in Antarctica
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