I want to solve a climbing problem in the mountains, not in the sporting goods store.

The wonderful things in life are the things you do, not the things you have.

Without the possibility of death, adventure is not possible.

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

I always take the same perspective with each new adventure. I put myself in the position of being at the end of my life looking back. Then I ask myself if what I am doing is important to me.

I didn’t go up there to die. I went up there to live.

Those that reach their goals perish.

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.

Bolts are the murder of the impossible.

My market value increases with every outside critisism. Therefore, the frequently raised contention that I am the most highly critisized mountaineer does not disturb me in the slightest.

I was in continual agony; I have never in my life been so tired as on the summit of Everest that day. I just sat and sat there, oblivious to everything.

We have conversations most nights, Sylvia Plath and me. On these cold wintry nights with our coffee mugs in hand, we talk for hours and hours, Sylvia Plath and me!

It is unwise to feel too much if we think too little.

Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness.

Love of country is the Mason's deed; world citizenship is his thought.

too many maniacs not enough michelangelos

Christianity provides a unified answer for the whole of life.

Some things just couldn't be protected from the storm. Some things simply needed to be broken off...Once the old things were broken off, amazingly beautiful things grow in their place.

Use your imagination lovingly on behalf of another.

I have transmitted genetic material, all I have to do between my daughters' birth and my death is to decorate my life.

What is planted in each person's soul will sprout.