Mountain Climb Quotes

The only mountain that I would still like to climb: I'd like to break 85. ~ Peter Falk

Wanting to take a light camera with me when I climb or do mountain runs has kept me using exclusively 35 mm. ~ Galen Rowell

To see what others can not...
You must climb the mountain ~ Ron Akers

Pursue wisdom, my child, but first that this is no skip through the pasture. This is a tiresome mountain climb and the summit is far beyond your years but there are treasures along the way. ~ Zoe Klein

When we tire of well-worn ways, we seek for new. This restless craving in the souls of men spurs them to climb, and to seek the mountain view. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Everybody thinks that once you reach the top, you can lie back on a divan with a goddamn mai tai. No. Wrong. Success is not a mountain climb. Success is a treadmill. ~ Susan Jane Gilman

I'm one of those people who always needs a mountain to climb. When I get up a mountain as far as I think I'm going to get, I try to find another mountain. ~ Polly Bergen

Take it from a guy: If you're in love with somebody, you will swim the stream, you will climb the mountain, you will slay the dragon. You're going to get to her somehow, some way. ~ Phil McGraw

It is my desire to be a great writer. I know that I still have a mountain to climb to achieve that. ~ Guy Johnson

What's a Klettersteig?" Dinah asked, trying to move on. "It is a mountain climb that is preengineered with cables, ladders, and so on." "To make it easier," Dinah guessed. "Oh, no. It is not easy. It is a way to take a climb that would be impossible, and make it merely extremely difficult." "Okay," Dinah said. "A good metaphor for what we are trying to do up here, then." "Yes, I suppose so!" Markus said, cheerfully enough. ~ Neal Stephenson

And it is sheer folly for a man who lives secluded from the world in his lowly hut, spending his days in idle delight in his garden, to pass off such matters as irrelevant to himself. Do you imagine that the enemy Impermanence will not come forcing its way into your peaceful mountain retreat? The recluse faces death as surely as the soldier setting forth to battle. ~ Yoshida Kenko

It's time to climb off our high horses and step into the shit. ~ Brian K. Vaughan

So, thought Peace, there was a wall around his heart and she wondered whether she should hoist up her skirt and scale that wall, but she knew she didn't have the right shoes on for that sort of climb because hers were too sensible for a man like Drake. ~ Sarah Winman

I've been an advocate against the view of the writer as a partitioned genius hanging in conceptual space, or up on a mountain, a bringer of Promethean fire, some unique transmission that comes out of nowhere. I prefer the opposite view - that writers come from somewhere. They read things, and they think about them, and they incorporate other people's thoughts. ~ Jonathan Lethem

We have mountain of debt that isn't going away and all the problems are here to stay, and anybody who tells you that is a good thing ought to get out of the business of helping the government down the road. ~ Rick Santelli

I like to think of Everest as a great mountaineering challenge, and when you've got people just streaming up the mountain - well, many of them are just climbing it to get their name in the paper, really. ~ Edmund Hillary

Duty is heavier than a mountain, Dai Shan.'
That time, Lan did flinch. How long had it been since someone had been able to do that to him with mere words? He remembered teaching that same concept to a youth out of the Two Rivers. A sheepherder, innocent of the world, fearful of the fate laid out before him by the Pattern. ~ Robert Jordan

What we tell, is rarely what we do. ~ Gregory David Roberts

After the climb, you should feel no trace of tiredness; on the contrary, it is then that you should be really fresh. Then you will have found the correct measure of your abilities. ~ Hermann Buhl

As a kid I never had the impulse to climb anything. I think that most kids who live in small towns or rural areas outside of the city, that's what they do - climb walls, or trees, or whatever. To me, it was more dance classes and not being very boyish. ~ Jamie Bell

My inner control freak had taken the day off ... I had descended from the mountain of the perfect, into the valley of the possible, and was now on the happy shaded trail, dappled with sunlight, of the present. It was the most wonderful walk of my life. ~ Elizabeth Bard

To believe in the soul - to believe in it exactly as much and as hardily as one believes in a mountain, say, or a fingernail, which is ever in view - imagine the consequences! How far-reaching, and thoroughly wonderful! For everything, by such a belief, would be charged, and changed. You wake in the morning, the soul exists, your mouth sings it, your mind accepts it. And the perceived, tactile world is, upon the instant, only half the world! ~ Mary Oliver

You're not the most troubled person I've worked with in my career, but you are unequivocally the strongest. There are some things that can't be taught. Either you have it or you don't." She nodded slowly. "You have it."

Jessica planted her feet on the ground and crossed her arms on the desk. "Have what?"

"A will to live that goes beyond circumstance and possibly even reason. You find something from nothing and feed off it. You're that flower that sprouts through a crack in the barren granite face of a mountain. You feel what everyone else has to see to believe. You sense the sun before you see its light, and you do it subconsciously. That's a gift. That's why you're still here - alive - with me today. ~ Jewel E. Ann

The hunter who accepts the sporting code of ethics keeps his commandments in the greatest solitude, with no witness or audience other than the sharp peaks of the mountain, the roaming cloud, the stern oak, the trembling juniper, and the passing animal. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sunstruck hills every day. ~ Diane Ackerman

Sweet moonlight, shining full and clear,
Why do you light my torture here?
How often have you seen me toil,
Burning last drops of midnight oil.
On books and papers as I read,
My friend, your mournful light you shed.
If only I could flee this den
And walk the mountain-tops again,
Through moonlit meadows make my way,
In mountain caves with spirits play -
Released from learning's musty cell,
Your healing dew would make me well! ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Life is good, and there's no reason to think it won't be
right up until the moment when everything explodes into a fireball of tiny, unrecognizable fragments, or it all goes skidding sideways, through the guardrail, over the embankment, and down the mountain. This will happen (and probably more than once). ~ Michael J. Fox

Beneath the moon, chilly winds blow through the pines
as wisps of clouds arise.
So many mountain ridges layer into each other
for miles around!
The valley stream is quiet and clear --
I'm not done with this boundless joy. ~ Peter Levitt

My uncle Max was a mountain, a shooting star, a big bear of a man, a piggyback ride waiting to happen, his pockets full of candy and, later money, or whatever the particular currency of our ages happened to be. He was rock concerts, baseball games, he was yes when my parents were no, he was a consolation for every disappointment. ~ Lisa Unger

An ounce of love can overcome a mountain of fear. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Dr. Luce introduced the concept of "periphescence". The word itself means nothing; Luce made it up to avoid any etymological associations. The state of periphescence, however, is well known. It denotes the first fever of human pair bonding. It causes giddiness, elation, a tickling on the chest wall, the urge to climb a balcony on the rope of the beloved's hair. Periphescence denotes the inital drugged and happy bedtime where you sniff your lover like a scented poppy for hours running. (It lasts, Luce explained, up to two years
tops.) ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

But everywhere dark shapes were already melting into the night, seeking asylum in the undergrowth and the jungle. Those not caught in the first haul headed for the mountains, stealing canoes and boats to make their way upstream; they were unarmed, almost naked, but determined to return to the way of life of their ancestors, somewhere the whites would not be able reach them. As they passed the outlying plantations, they spread the news amongst their own people, and ten, twenty, more men would abandon their work, deserting the fields of indigo and clover, to swell the numbers of the runaways. And in parties of one hundred, two hundred at a time, followed by their wives carrying children, they moved off into the interior, through thickets and crags, in search of a place they could build a palisade. As they fled they scattered mullein seeds in the streams and rivulets, so that fish would be poisoned and infect the water with their miasma as they putrefied. Beyond this torrent, beyond that mountain clothed in waterfalls, Africa would begin again; they would go back to forgotten tongues, to the rites of circumcision, to the worship of the earlier gods, who had preceded the recent gods of Christianity. The undergrowth closed behind men who were retracing the course of history, to regain an age when Creation had been ruled by the fertile Venus, with her huge breasts and her ample belly, who was worshipped in deep caves where a hand was haltingly tracing its first configurations of th ~ Alejo Carpentier

Men come and go. They lie, or die, or leave you. A mountain is not a man, though, and a stone is a mountain's daughter. I trust myself, and I trust my mules. I won't fall. ~ George R R Martin

The phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious. There are objects approximating the shape of a disc, some of which appear flat on bottom and domed on top. These objects are as large as man-made aircraft and have a metallic or light-reflecting surface. Further they exhibit extreme rates of climb and maneuverability with no associated sound and take action which must be considered evasive when contacted by aircraft and radar. ~ Nathan Farragut Twining

I see myself being married to my girlfriend and backpacking all over the world. If I can go out and do a 15-mile hike and climb a 12,000-ft. peak, I'm good to go. ~ Matt Long

The Mountain

My students look at me expectantly.
I explain to them that the life of art is a life
of endless labor. Their expressions
hardly change; they need to know
a little more about endless labor.
So I tell them the story of Sisyphus,
how he was doomed to push
a rock up a mountain, knowing nothing
would come of this effort
but that he would repeat it
indefinitely. I tell them
there is joy in this, in the artist's life,
that one eludes
judgment, and as I speak
I am secretly pushing a rock myself,
slyly pushing it up the steep
face of a mountain. Why do I lie
to these children? They aren't listening,
they aren't deceived, their fingers
tapping at the wooden desks -
So I retract
the myth; I tell them it occurs
in hell, and that the artist lies
because he is obsessed with attainment,
that he perceives the summit
as that place where he will live forever,
a place about to be
transformed by his burden: with every breath,
I am standing at the top of the mountain.
Both my hands are free. And the rock has added
height to the mountain. ~ Louise Gluck

I remember my father checking on a mountain kid who hadn't been coming to school. My father had this beautiful Harris tweed overcoat. He came back with a knife cut all down one side. The parents had told him it was none of his business why their son wasn't going to school. ~ Charles Frazier

Then a few months ago I found myself talking to the tree. An entire conversation, just me and a tree. And on the climb down I felt like crying. Why didn't I have someone real to talk to? Why didn't I have a best friend like everyone else seemed to? Sure, there were kids I knew at school, but none of them were close friends. They'd have no interest in climbing the tree. In smelling the sunshine. ~ Wendelin Van Draanen

The author makes a tacit deal with the reader. You hand them a backpack. You ask them to place certain things in it - to remember, to keep in mind - as they make their way up the hill. If you hand them a yellow Volkswagen and they have to haul this to the top of the mountain - to the end of the story - and they find that this Volkswagen has nothing whatsoever to do with your story, you're going to have a very irritated reader on your hands. ~ Frank Conroy

Every time I walk through a swamp or the woods, or climb into a boat on the Ouachita River, I see evidence of God all around me. As far as I'm concerned, that's all the proof I need to know I'm living in His house. ~ Jase Robertson

Average leaders take you to the mountain.
Superior leaders take you up the mountain.
Excellent leaders take you to mountaintop.
Transcendent leaders take you to the stars. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Proscenium of nearly identical mountain ridges, arched out and downward, one 'after' another, to the valley floor: curtains tied back, a gesture ~ Rae Armantrout

Sorry to inform you...but as a fellow failed miner, the problem is there's nowhere left to dig.
We're real poets man.
And whatever. But it's the digging, it's the holes! Its these burrows to half nestle in just to pass the time, to chafe the inner thigh of boredom and that level of power-demanding pain is only in existence because you really, really know that there isn't anything else.
The holes.
And me missing a shovel, that has created the voids, the tears, the fucks, the sucks, the shame, the stares, the songs, the words, and in admittedly, even more holes. Not having one of my shovels has somehow overcompensated the digs in which I've dug.
The holes.
The holes are why you smoke aware of cancer, a disease to take over years of boring lives, and give us a bone to gnaw on, overcome, defeat, lick-dry, or die.
The holes are why you drink with your last dollars, when you know you're going to throw it up tonight anyway.
The holes are why you think you're in love, and that's a hole that you might not climb back from.
The holes, the holes the holes, making you question everything standing at a bus stop...smelling like cigarettes and perfume...signing up for classes you wont go to... hand covered in club stamps... face covered in guilt... Maybe go to a protest and just stand there...Or lay in bed when there's no way you can sleep... ~ Wesley Eisold

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be, I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sand pile at Sunday School. ~ Robert Fulghum

"Solid wastes" are the discarded leftovers of our advanced consumer society. This growing mountain of garbage and trash represents not only an attitude of indifference toward valuable natural resources, but also a serious economic and public health problem. ~ Jimmy Carter

But someone once told me, you cannot climb a well from the middle, you must fall right to the bottom. Once you are there, in the cold, alone and ankle deep in slime, you'll look up and you'll get a real sense of the dark and the work involved to climb towards the light, the truth. ~ Salena Godden

In Highland New Guinea, now Popua New Guinea, a British district officer named James Taylor contacted a mountain village, above three thousand feet, whose tribe had never seen any trace of the outside world. It was the 1930s. He described the courage of one villager. One day, on the airstrip hacked from the mountains near his village, this man cut vines and lashed himself to the fuselage of Taylor's airplane shortly before it took off. He explained calmly to his loved ones that, no matter what happened to him, he had to see where it came from. ~ Annie Dillard

If you look at people that have survived crashing in the mountains and lived up in the snow for 40 days - it's possible to do extraordinary feats. ~ Sylvester Stallone

Why did you even bring a whip?"
"Because Tristan wouldn't let me bring the Thor hammer. Besides, you never know when you'll need a whip. What if we need to climb something really tall or swing across a deep chasm? ~ Chelsea Fine

Man is a megalomaniac among animals-if he sees mountains he will try to imitate them by pyramids, and if he sees some grand process like evolution, and thinks it would be at all possible for him to be in on that game, he would irreverently have to have his whack at that too. That daring megalomania of his-has it not brought him to his present place? ~ Jacques Loeb

Think only on the climb. Think on what you control ~ Lois Lowry

I've seen and swam and climbed and lived and driven and filmed. Should it all end tomorrow, I can definitely say there would be no regrets. I am very lucky, and I know it. I really have lived 5,000 times over. ~ Benedict Cumberbatch

As I came down from the mountain, I recalled how, not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it's often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources - it's a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources. Going nowhere, as Cohen had shown me, is not about austerity so much as about coming closer to one's senses. I ~ Pico Iyer

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks. ~ Tennessee Williams

I observe that there are two entirely different theories according to which individual men seek to get on in the world. One theory leads a man to pull down everybody around him in order to climb up on them to a higher place. The other leads a man to help everybody around him in order that he may go up with them. ~ Elihu Root

Be still like a mountain and flow like a great river. ~ Laozi

There is no doubt that Earth Central, the planetary and sector AIs, and even some ship and drone AIs are capable, without acquiring additional processing space, of setting up synergetic systems within themselves that result in an exponential climb in intelligence (mathematically defined as climbing beyond all known scales within minutes). So why not? Ask then why a human, capable of learning verbatim the complete works of Shakespeare, instead drinks a bottle of brandy, then giggles a lot and falls over. ~ Neal Asher

She gazed out at the seductive vista. The countryside was dressed in its prettiest May garb- everything budding or blooming or bursting out in the exuberance of late spring. For Laura, the landscape at thirteen hundred feet up a Welsh mountain was the perfect mix of reassuringly tamed and excitingly wild. In front of the house were lush, high meadows filled with sheep, the lambs plump from their mother's grass-rich milk. Their creamy little shapes bright and clean against the background of pea green. A stream tumbled down the hillside, disappearing into the dense oak woods at the far end of the fields, the ocher trunks fuzzy with moss. On either side of the narrow valley, the land rose steeply to meet the open mountain on the other side of the fence. Here young bracken was springing up sharp and tough to claim the hills for another season. Beyond, in the distance, more mountains rose and fell as far as the eye could see. Laura undid the latch and pushed open the window. She closed her eyes. A warm sigh of the wind carried the scent of hawthorn blossom from the hedgerow. ~ Paula Brackston