Because it's there. (when asked why he wanted to climb Everest)

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.

The greatest danger in life is not to take the adventure.

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

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.

One must conquer, achieve, get to the top; one must know the end to be convinced that one can win the end - to know there's no dream that mustn't be dared. . .

For the stone from the top for geologists, the knowledge of the limits of endurance for the doctors, but above all for the spirit of adventure to keep alive the soul of man.

One comes to bless the absolute bareness, feeling that here is a pure beauty of form, a kind of ultimate harmony.

To struggle and to understand. Never the last without the first. That is the law.

We will stomp to the top with the wind in our teeth.

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.

Draw a circle, not a heart, around the one you love because a heart can break but a circle goes on forever.

Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of the church

If there's one area of me that the devil's got a hold of, it's my tongue.

I will never use a substitute for butter. Margarine is one molecule away from eating plastic. If I'm going to eat that type of food, it's going to be the real deal.

Pure driving, pure racing, that´s what makes me happy.

I don't feel comfortable with violence, and I'm not sure that I film violent scenes properly, and it's something I'm reticent to do, and yet violence is sort of in all of my films.

A good day's writing, when I turn off my computer after I know that I've written okay, or as well as I can write, that's a day well spent.

Music is not written in red, white and blue. It is written in the heart's blood of the composer.

As order is heavenly, where quiet is had, so error is hell, or a mischief as bad.