I’m primarily concerned with what happens inside a person when they encounter the mountains. When you climb a mountain, you come back down as a different person. We don’t change the mountain by climbing it; we ourselves change.
The wonderful things in life are the things you do, not the things you have.
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.
Mountains are not fair or unfair, they are just dangerous.
I didn’t go up there to die. I went up there to live.
Those that reach their goals perish.
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...
Bolts are the murder of the impossible.
I want to solve a climbing problem in the mountains, not in the sporting goods store.
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.
After every few steps, we huddle over our ice axes mouths agape, struggling for sufficient breath to keep our muscles going... at a height of 8800 metres, we can no longer keep on our feet while we rest. We crumple to our knees, clutching our axes... Every ten or fifteen steps we collapse into the snow to rest, then crawl on again.
I came to realize that my path to knowledge would not lead me to libraries, professors, universities, and studies. My path to knowledge was through living life and experiencing reality. I could learn plenty secondhand, but nothing was ever to surpass the experiences I had in the wilderness. All my knowledge of social, scentific, and religious issues has been acquired through personal experience.
For it depended entirely on me as to whether the myth of the mountain was to be transformed and the path found between the supernatural and reality. It was in me that all expectations were vested.
What gives me strength is the feeling of being independent. In effect, I’m really just a dilettante. I’ve lived, explored, and worked – but only in nonjobs. I’ve often achieved success against all the predictions. And I’ve done it by following a very simple pattern of behavior: stick at it and do everything in my power to make it happen.
I would rather be ostracized than assimilated! I read recently that my greatest accomplishment was my unerring ability to make myself unpopular.
By going to places where I do not belong, I experience the art of living – orientation through disorientation. All the deserts of the world lie within us, after all.