Mountain Climbers Quotes

“Most people would not attempt to climb Mount Everest on their own. Typically, climbers will look toward Sherpas, who have served as guides for generations in Nepal, high in the Himalayas. They help climbers prepare and show them along the routes that will get them to the top. They are seasoned and know every details of the trails. But your guide is even more essentail if you are to make it back down safely. Coming down the mountain can be the most perilous part. You're tired. Your defenses are down. You may very well fall at the critical moment. You need that guide. As you approach retirement, you are moving to a different phase of life. You are descending the mountain.”

— Christopher Abts

“Like high mountain climbers who set up a base in the valley at the foot of the mountains and another camp and camp number two and camp number three at various heights on the road to the peak, and in every camp they leave food and provisions and equipment to make their last climb easier and to collect on their way back everything that might help them as they descend, so I leave my childhood and my youth and my adult years in various camps with a flag on every camp. I know I shall never return, but to get to the peak with no weight, light, light!”

— Yehuda Amichai

“When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.”

— John McPhee

“I wonder if it's like this for mountain climbers, he thought. You climb bigger and bigger mountains and you know that one day one of them is going to be just that bit too steep. But you go on doing it, because it's so-o good when you breathe the air up there. And you know you'll die falling.”

— Terry Pratchett

“I explained I wanted to descend as quickly as possible to camp IV in order to warm myself and gather a supply of hot drink and oxygen in the event I might need to go back up the mountain to assist descending climbers.”

— Anatoli Boukreev

“Mountain climbers think of the mountain not of the danger.”

— Marty Rubin

“I love to read about the exploits of technical mountain climbers, but I've never done any vertical climbing.”

— Will Hobbs

“There's a lot of mountain climbers trapped inside of bodies of people behind the counter at Kinko's.”

— Henry Rollins

“That I was a swimmer made no waves; it seems to be a law of human nature
that those who live by the sea are suspicious of swimmers, just as those who live in the mountains are suspicious of mountain climbers.”

— Yann Martel

“I think our storytellers - our songwriters should be great storytellers, and they should be mountain climbers and explorers, because music is something that can cross all different borders.”

— Jason Mraz

“The mountain is a mirror, where climbers look to find themselves. They discover their frailty, take heart from their strengths, drink deep of the insights.”

— Lincoln Hall

“As climbers, we need to sacrifice our comfort, our safety, and arguably our sanity, as a tithe to the mountain ... We need the mountains but the mountains do not need us.”

— Lincoln Hall

“I thought again of the mountain climbers we had met as we traveled. They were young and wore brightly colored clothing so as to be easily spotted should they become lost in the snow. They knew the right path to follow to the peaks. The heights were already festooned with aluminum pins; all they had to do was attach their lines to them, and they could climb safely. They were there for a holiday adventure, and on Monday they would return to their jobs with the feeling that they had challenged nature and won. But this wasn't really true. The adventurous ones were those who had climbed there first, the ones who had found the routes to the top.”

— Paulo Coelho

“Never let failure discourage you. Every time you get to the base of a mountain (literal or metaphorical), you're presented with a new opportunity to challenge yourself, to push your limits beyond what you thought possible, to learn from climbers on the trail ahead of you, and to take in some amazing views. Your performance on the mountain you climbed last week or last month or last year doesn't matter - because it's all about what you are doing right now.”

— Alison Levine

“The reason mountain climbers are tied together is to keep the sane ones from going home.”

— Gerhard E Frost

“How wonderful is Cold Mountain Climbers are all afraid The moon shines on clear water twinkle twinkle Wind rustles the tall grass Plum trees flower in the snow Bare twisted trees have clouds for foliage A touch of rain brings it all alive Unless you see clearly do not approach”

— Hanshan

“Everest wasn't like any other mountain. Only one of ten climbers who attempt the mountain stands on the summit. And for every three climbers who do scale the mountain, one dies trying. The facts aren't welcoming. But you don't plan a trip to Everest believing those facts will apply to you.”

— Stacy Allison

“But we are all insane, anyway. Note the mountain-climbers.”

— Mark Twain

“There is an interconnectedness among members that bonds the family, much like mountain climbers who rope themselves together when climbing a mountain, so that if someone should slip or need support, he's held up by the others until he regains his footing.”

— Phil McGraw