Climbing Mount Everest Quotes

I have climbed my mountain, but I must still live my life.

The highest of the world's mountains, it seems, has to make but a single gesture of magnificence to be the lord of all, vast in unchallenged and isolated supremacy.

I can't understand why men make all this fuss about Everest-it's only a mountain.

Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said Because it is there. Well, space is there, and were going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there.

- Why do you want to climb Mt. Everest, Sir? - Because it is there.

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

If it is a shame to be the second man on Mount Everest, then I will have to live with this shame.

There are two things I will never do in my life. I will never climb Mount Everest, and I will never work with Val Kilmer again. There isn't enough money in the world.

The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this; What is the use of climbing Mount Everest? and my answer must at once be, it is no use. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever.

No one remembers who climbed Mount Everest the second time.

I think the whole attitude towards climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top. They don't give a damn for anybody else who may be in distress and it doesn't impress me at all that they leave someone lying under a rock to die.

We don't live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means, and that is what life is for.

You've climbed the highest mountain in the world. What's left ? It's all downhill from there. You've got to set your sights on something higher than Everest.

It's amazing that more people have climbed Mount Everest than have broken the 4-minute mile.

When you're climbing Mount Everest, nothing is easy. You just take one step at a time, never look back and always keep your eyes glued to the top.

While on top of Everest, I looked across the valley towards the great peak Makalu and mentally worked out a route about how it could be climbed. It showed me that even though I was standing on top of the world, it wasn't the end of everything. I was still looking beyond to other interesting challenges.

But now that I was finally here, standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn't summon the energy to care.

People think that at the top there isn't much room. They tend to think of it as an Everest. My message is that there is tons of room at the top.

A lot of the time I hate the theater. You think, 'I have to climb Mount Everest, again, tonight.' Oh, the theater is a scary place to be.

Start with short stories. After all, if you were taking up rock climbing, you wouldn't start with Mount Everest. So if you're starting fantasy, don't start with a nine-book series.

Gradually, very gradually, we saw the great mountain sides and glaciers and aretes, now one fragment and now another through the floating rifts, until far higher in the sky than imagination had dared to suggest the white summit of Everest appeared.

This forms the nub of a dilemna that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you're too driven you're likely to die.

Climbing to the top demands strength, whether it is to the top of Mount Everest or to the top of your career.

You don't play triathlon. You play soccer; it's fun. You play baseball. Triathlon is work that you can leave you crumpled in a heap, puking on the roadside. It's the physical brutality of climbing Mount Everest without the great view from the top of the world. What kind of person keeps coming back for more of that?

Sure, climbing Mount Everest would be cool, but that's something I would now like to do as a family. Big experiences like that I don't want to have on my own anymore. I want to share them.

When I meet people who say - which they do all of the time - 'I must just tell you, my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live, but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest,' and so forth, I switch off quite early.

I soon learned that Everest wasn't a private affair. It belonged to many men.

Just put one foot in front of the other.

What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money.

Ever since the morning of May 29, 1953, when Tenzing Norgay and I became the first climbers to step onto the summit of Mount Everest, I've been called a great adventurer.

So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.