I always take the same perspective with each new adventure. I put myself in the position of being at the end of my life looking back. Then I ask myself if what I am doing is important to me.

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

Without the possibility of death, adventure is not possible.

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

I didn’t go up there to die. I went up there to live.

Those that reach their goals perish.

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 summits.

I want to solve a climbing problem in the mountains, not in the sporting goods store.

Bolts are the murder of the impossible.

My market value increases with every outside critisism. Therefore, the frequently raised contention that I am the most highly critisized mountaineer does not disturb me in the slightest.

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.

But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do.

Shakespeare was so ahead of his time that people still don't talk that way.

Why did everyone send casseroles in times of crisis? Why didn't anyone ever send brownies and Jack Daniel's?

What is important is to keep learning to enjoy challenge and to tolerate ambiguity. In the end there are no certain answers.

In the end, I want to be able to say, 'My life was what I made it.

What good can the scriptures do to a man who has no sense of his own? Of what use is as mirror to a blind man?

Writing doesn't come easily to me. It gets more and more difficult.

We don't mature momentarily, but over the long-term.

Nothing so weakens government as persistent inflation.