Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it.
Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.
It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.
Somewhere between the bottom of the climb and the summit is the answer to the mystery why we climb.
May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
While cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
Going to the mountains is going home.
It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out; it's the grain of sand in your shoe.
On this proud and beautiful mountain we have lived hours of fraternal, warm and exalting nobility. Here for a few days we have ceased to be slaves and have really been men. It is hard to return to servitude.
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.
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.
Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.
Over every mountain there is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley.
You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it.
The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this; What is the use of climbing Mount Everest? and my answer must at once be, it is no use. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever.
Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.
There's no such thing as bad weather - only the wrong clothes.
There's no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing
or simply: