Classical mountaineering is a completely anarchical activity. Its only measures are possible or impossible.

Climbing for me was more than a sport. Danger and difficulty were part of the game, together with adventure and exposure.

Climbing is all about freedom, the freedom to go beyond all the rules and take a chance, to experience something new, to gain insight into human nature.

Climbing is not a competition, and you cannot talk in terms of “greatest”, it means nothing,

Experienced mountaineers, they know that the real feeling is—after you’ve made a summit and come back—the feeling of being reborn.

I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits.

I made my own ABC of climbing. A is no artificial oxygen. B is no bolts. And C is no communication systems.

I was 5 when I went up my first 10,000ft mountain, with my parents, and I have been climbing ever since.

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 … I knew I was physically at the end of my tether.

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

Standing now in diffused light, with the wind at my back, I experience suddenly a feeling of completeness–not a feeling of having achieved something or of being stronger than everyone who was ever here before, not a feeling of having arrived at the ultimate point, not a feeling of supremacy. Just a breath of happiness deep inside my mind and my breast. The summit seemed suddenly to me to be a refuge, and I had not expected to find any refuge up here. Looking at the steep, sharp ridges below us, I have the impression that to have come later would have been too late. Everything we now say to one another, we only say out of embarrassment. I don’t think anymore. As I pull the tape recorder, trancelike, from my rucksack, and switch it on wanting to record a few appropriate phrases, tears again well into my eyes. “Now we are on the summit of Everest,” I begin, “it is so cold that we cannot take photographs…” I cannot go on, I am immediately shaken with sobs. I can neither talk nor think, feeling only how this momentous experience changes everything. To reach only a few meters below the summit would have required the same amount of effort, the same anxiety and burden of sorrow, but a feeling like this, an eruption of feeling, is only possible on the summit itself.

The big problem with being solo is that you cannot divide fear. Doing a difficult ascent is a lot about your own fear, and if you are together with another person, or with two people, you can divide that fear, share it. But when you are alone, the fear is all on you, and it’s very difficult to learn to cope with it.

The last few meters up to the summit no longer seem so hard. On reaching the top, I sit down and let my legs dangle into space. I don’t have to climb anymore. I pull my camera from my rucksack and, in my down mittens, fumble a long time with the batteries before I have it working properly. Then I film Peter. Now, after the hours of torment, which indeed I didn’t recognize as torment, now, when the monotonous motion of plodding upwards is at an end, and I have nothing more to do than breathe, a great peace floods my whole being. I breathe like someone who has run the race of his life and knows that he may now rest forever. I keep looking all around, because the first time I didn’t see anything of the panorama I had expected from Everest, neither indeed did I notice how the wind was continually chasing snow across the summit. 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 the summits.

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

There are three elements of mountaineering—difficulty, danger, and exposure. Difficulty is the technical aspect of it. Danger, it is best to avoid, but some people like to increase danger to a point where their success is dependent only on luck. And exposure, which is what truly defines Alpinism, is what you face in wild nature. It’s the weather, the cold, the oxygen, the storms, the avalanches and rock falls, rain and snow. It’s the exposure that determines how you will move, it tells you that one wrong step means death. Exposure means no help is coming from outside, it’s you and the mountain.

We go to the mountains to experience … how human beings must have felt a hundred thousand years ago, before civilization, governments, social structures, religions, and all the rules that you must follow to be a human.