Climbing Quotes (9 quotes)
Climbing is not a competition, and you cannot talk in terms of “greatest”, it means nothing,
Rejecting being called the “greatest” climber, during interview, in Rudraneil Sengupta, 'Reinhold Messner: When You’re Alone, Fear is All on You', Mint (1 Mar 2014). A business newspaper in India, also online at livemint.com website.
Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good,
And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.
And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.
'Locksley Hall Sixty Years After' (1886), collected in Alfred Tennyson and William James Rolfe (ed.) The Poetic and Dramatic Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1898), 522.
I have not conquered Everest, it has merely tolerated me.
…...
I made my own ABC of climbing. A is no artificial oxygen. B is no bolts. And C is no communication systems.
A bolt is an artificial anchor drilled into a rock to aid climbing. From interview with Rudraneil Sengupta, 'Reinhold Messner: When You’re Alone, Fear is All on You', Mint (1 Mar 2014). A business newspaper in India, also online at livemint.com website.
I was 5 when I went up my first 10,000ft mountain, with my parents, and I have been climbing ever since.
From interview with Rudraneil Sengupta, 'Reinhold Messner: When You’re Alone, Fear is All on You', Mint (1 Mar 2014). A business newspaper in India, also online at livemint.com website.
Man … begins life as an ambiguous speck of matter which can in no way be distinguished from the original form of the lowest animal or plant. He next becomes a cell; his life is precisely that of the animalcule. Cells cluster round this primordial cell, and the man is so far advanced that he might be mistaken for an undeveloped oyster; he grows still more, and it is clear that he might even be a fish; he then passes into a stage which is common to all quadrupeds, and next assumes a form which can only belong to quadrupeds of the higher type. At last the hour of birth approaches; coiled within the dark womb he sits, the image of an ape; a caricature of the man that is to be. He is born, and for some time he walks only on all fours; he utters only inarticulate sounds; and even in his boyhood his fondness for climbing trees would seem to be a relic of the old arboreal life.
In The Martyrdom of Man (1876), 393.
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.
About solo mountain climbing. From interview with Rudraneil Sengupta, 'Reinhold Messner: When You’re Alone, Fear is All on You', Mint (1 Mar 2014). A business newspaper in India, also online at livemint.com website.
The structure known, but not yet accessible by synthesis, is to the chemist what the unclimbed mountain, the uncharted sea, the untilled field, the unreached planet, are to other men … The unique challenge which chemical synthesis provides for the creative imagination and the skilled hand ensures that it will endure as long as men write books, paint pictures, and fashion things which are beautiful, or practical, or both.
In 'Art and Science in the Synthesis of Organic Compounds: Retrospect and Prospect', in Maeve O'Connor (ed.), Pointers and Pathways in Research (1963), 41.
The useless search of philosophers for a cause of the universe is a regressus in infinitum (a stepping backwards into the infinite) and resembles climbing up an endless ladder, the recurring question as to the cause of the cause rendering the attainment of a final goal impossible.
From Force and Matter: Or, Principles of the Natural Order of the Universe (15th ed. 1884), 10.