Hillary Everest Quotes

No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here’s a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages 1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn’t stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. 2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5. 3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on “Bright Eyes.” 4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank. 5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13. 6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14. 7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15. 8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil. 9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19. 10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961. 11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936. 12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 23 13) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 24 14) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record 15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity 16) Lance E. Armstrong was 27 when he won the tour de France 17) Michelangelo created two of the greatest sculptures “David” and “Pieta” by age 28 18) Alexander the Great, by age 29, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world 19) J.K. Rowling was 30 years old when she finished the first manuscript of Harry Potter 20) Amelia Earhart was 31 years old when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean 21) Oprah was 32 when she started her talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind 22) Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to reach Mount Everest 23) Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he wrote the speech “I Have a Dream." 24) Marie Curie was 35 years old when she got nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics 25) The Wright brothers, Orville (32) and Wilbur (36) invented and built the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight 26) Vincent Van Gogh was 37 when he died virtually unknown, yet his paintings today are worth millions. 27) Neil Armstrong was 38 when he became the first man to set foot on the moon. 28) Mark Twain was 40 when he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and 49 years old when he wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" 29) Christopher Columbus was 41 when he discovered the Americas 30) Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger 31) John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he became President of the United States 32) Henry Ford Was 45 when the Ford T came out. 33) Suzanne Collins was 46 when she wrote "The Hunger Games" 34) Charles Darwin was 50 years old when his book On the Origin of Species came out. 35) Leonardo Da Vinci was 51 years old when he painted the Mona Lisa. 36) Abraham Lincoln was 52 when he became president. 37) Ray Kroc Was 53 when he bought the McDonalds Franchise and took it to unprecedented levels. 38) Dr. Seuss was 54 when he wrote "The Cat in the Hat". 40) Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III was 57 years old when he successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. All of the 155 passengers aboard the aircraft survived 41) Colonel Harland Sanders was 61 when he started the KFC Franchise 42) J.R.R Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out 43) Ronald Reagan was 69 when he became President of the US 44) Jack Lalane at age 70 handcuffed, shackled, towed 70 rowboats 45) Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President

Anyone who lives in her own world is crazy. Like schizophrenics, psychopaths, maniacs. I mean people who are different from others.' Like you?' On the other hand,' Zedka continued, pretending not to have heard the remark, 'you have Einstein, saying that there was no time or space, just a combination of the two. Or Columbus, insisting that on the other side of the world lay not an abyss but a continent. Or Edmund Hillary, convinced that a man could reach the top of Everest. Or the Beatles, who created an entirely different sort of music and dressed like people from another time. Those people--and thousands of others--all lived in their own world.

You don't have to be a hero to accomplish great things---to compete. You can just be an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals.

As a youngster I was a great dreamer, reading many books of adventure and walking lonely miles with my head in the clouds.

I have been seriously afraid at times but have used my fear as a stimulating factor rather than allowing it to paralyse me. My abilities have not been outstanding, but I have had sufficient strength and determination to meet my challenges and have usually managed to succeed with them.

Did you know that Edmund Hillary is the first man to climb to the top of Mount Everest?" I ask Dad. Dad mumbles back, "No one gives credit to the Sherpa who took him up there.

Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy 'experience'—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim 'worked' well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton's memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York. Sen. Clinton was born in 1947, and Sir Edmund Hillary and his partner Tenzing Norgay did not ascend Mount Everest until 1953, so the story was self-evidently untrue and eventually yielded to fact-checking. Indeed, a spokeswoman for Sen. Clinton named Jennifer Hanley phrased it like this in a statement in October 2006, conceding that the tale was untrue but nonetheless charming: 'It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.' Perfect. It worked, in other words, having been coined long after Sir Edmund became a bankable celebrity, but now its usefulness is exhausted and its untruth can safely be blamed on Mummy.

Sir Edmund Hillary, Everest’s first conqueror, once said that the mountains gave him strength. I’d never really understood this until now. But it was intoxicating. Something deep inside me knew that I could do this.

On the third day they were there, Tenzing Norgay came to see Chatral Rinpoche. It was Tenzing Norgay who, a few years earlier, together with the New Zealander Edmund Hillary, was the first to scale the highest peak in the world, Mount Everest.

If you have the desire, you have the ability. Don’t question how it’s going to happen, because you won’t know that until after it happens. Hillary did not know how to get to the top of Mount Everest until after he got there. The Wright brothers didn’t know how to get the plane in the air until after they did.

If it were discovered that Mallory had, in actual fact, set foot on the top of Everest, obviously it would make some difference to Tenzing and myself. For 33 years, we have been regarded as the heroic figures who first reached the summit of Everest. Well, now I guess we'd be just downgraded a little bit, to being the first two men who reached the summit and actually got safely down again. Which brings up a point, of course. If you climb a mountain for the first time and die on the descent, is it really a complete first ascent of the mountain? I'm rather inclined to think, personally, that maybe it's quite important, the getting down. And the complete climb of a mountain is reaching the summit and getting safely to the bottom again.

In 1996 the disasters on the mountain had robbed Neil of the chance to go above camp four. Two years on he was here again--only this time the summit was within his reach. He felt strong and waited anxiously for Mick to arrive. They would need to be together to manage the last ridge and the Hillary Step. Something told Neil that things were not going right. As the precious minutes slipped by, as he waited for Mick and the others to reach him, he sensed that the dream that had eluded him once was going to do so again. Somewhere along the way, there had been a misunderstanding between the climbers over who had what rope. It happens at high altitude. It is a simple mistake. But mistakes have consequences. Suddenly, here, at four hundred feet beneath the summit of Mount Everest, it dawned on them all that they had run out of rope. They would have no choice now but to retreat. Continuing was not even an option. Neil stared through his goggles at the summit: so close, yet so very far. All he felt was emptiness. He turned and never looked back.

The small staircase, with its faded oriental runner, loomed as steep and impassable as Everest’s Hillary Steps.

His confession felt like finding out my cat—Sir Edmund Hillary, named after the first man to climb Mt Everest—could talk and wanted to give me a tongue bath. At best, Sir Hillary was indifferent to my existence. At worst, he may have been plotting my demise. He was an audacious Calico psychopath, always pushing his litterbox from its place beside the toilet in the bathroom directly in front of the shower, but only when I was in the shower…

Sometimes the journey ahead can feel so daunting and so implausible that we lack the courage to take the first step. And there is never a shortage of good excuses: it’s not the right time; the odds are too stacked against me; or no one like me has ever done it before. I’m also willing to bet that Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Everest, or even Thomas Edison, trying thousands and thousands of times to make the light bulb work, had a good list of excuses that they could have used, too. And I can promise you they all felt inadequate at many times along their path. You know what the sad thing is? It’s that most people never find out what they are truly capable of, because the mountain looks frightening from the bottom, before you begin. It is easier to look down than up. There’s a poignant poem by Christopher Logue that I’m often reminded of when people tell me their ‘reasons’ for not embarking on a great adventure. Come to the edge. We might fall. Come to the edge. It’s too high! COME TO THE EDGE! And they came, And we pushed, And they flew.

This was a key moment in the expedition. In years to come, the crack would become known as ‘House’s Chimney’, K2’s equivalent of the ‘Hillary Step’ on Everest. Future generations of climbers would marvel at the skill, and guts, of the man who first climbed it.

I imagine Einstein emerging from his bedroom: ‘Mother, good news, I have just unified space and time in one theory. I’m calling it my Special Theory of Relativity.’ ‘Albert, Albert, don’t be a show-off. No one likes a bragger. If the theory is so special, you should let other people say so.’ Or Sir Edmund Hillary, back from Everest: ‘I made it, Dad.’ ‘Well, that’s good, son, but it’s no reason to tramp snow into the living room.

Edmund Hillary was the first man to summit Mount Everest, and it took a while before his Sherpa, Tenzing Norgay, received the recognition he deserved for summiting Everest alongside Hillary. In many respects, John and Pieter have been Tenzing to me. John is the Sherpa who was by my side for almost every step of my professional coaching career. I have never reached a summit by myself.

The tallest mountains generally get the most attention. Fourteen of the world’s peaks are more than 26,247 feet high. The region about 25,000 feet is known as a mountain’s “death zone,” an altitude the human body can only endure for a few days…when Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest in 1953, he reverenced the mountain as Chomolungma, the “Mother Goddess of the World.” By contrast, after finished the ascent, Edmund Hillary wisecracked to a member of the team, “well, we’ve knocked the bastard off.” Some folks seem tone-deaf to mystery.

Perhaps it was for the best that it was the native Tenzing Norgay and the down-to-earth New Zealander Ed Hillary who finally 'knocked the bastard off'. They both used the achievement to better effect than a dream-filled Englishman might have.

Cowards criticize mainly because it makes them feel better about their own lack of courage to try anything daring themselves. So the best (though often the hardest) thing to do is to ignore their criticism. Or, even better, use it as fuel to your fire. We all face criticism and we all have to live with our ‘failures’, and other people’s opinions of those ‘failures’, but try not to take them personally. Consider them as signposts that you are doing something right. It means you are where you should be: in the arena, in the battle, and another stepping stone closer to success. Edmund Hillary, Neil Armstrong, you know the names. Men who embraced the ultimate in risk and failure. And if they hadn’t faced the risk and failure, then both Everest and the moon would have very different stories to tell. You see, if it was all easy then everyone would succeed. It is precisely the risk and the chances of failure that give us the opportunity for success. And if you can fail more than anyone else you know, I just bet that you will finally succeed! Fail, fail, fail again. Sound strange? Well, it is a key to succeeding. Go out there, take calculated risks, work hard, be ready for the break, and be prepared to run when everyone else is slowing down. Then success will come knocking. It is a law of the universe and a wonderful part of how the world works.

Neal, Mike and Klev somehow did find High Camp that night, but were on their hands and knees by the time they did. None of them had anything left. They weren’t going to return for us; they couldn’t. The Sherpas in camp wouldn’t. There was no one else to try, except for the Russian, Anatoli Boukreev. That day, Anatoli had forsaken his duty as a guide. While everyone was struggling up and down the ridge to the summit, or stacked up like cordwood at the Hillary Step, Anatoli climbed for himself, by himself, without oxygen. He just went straight up, tagged the summit, and came straight back down. Because he lacked oxygen, he couldn’t persist in the cold, and was forced to retreat to the shelter of his tent. So Boukreev had been in his tent recovering for hours, and if that was where his story had ended that night, the climbing community would have stripped the flesh right off his bones. They are not a forgiving bunch. But Anatoli did what no one else could, or would do. He went out into that storm three times, searching both for Scott Fischer, who froze to death on the mountain, about twelve hundred feet above the South Col, and for us. Boukreev twice was driven back to camp by the wind and cold. The third time he located our little huddle by the face and brought in each of the three Fischer climbers—Tim, Charlotte and Sandy. He left behind Yasuko and me, the Hall climbers.

It can get extremely warm around Base Camp on a sunny day in May. A thermometer left out in the afternoon sun by the Hillary expedition reportedly registered a high temperature of about 150 degrees.

By noon, three climbers from our group descended toward me: Stuart Hutchison, Lou Kasischke and John Taske (Frank Fischbeck already had turned back). They said there was a slowdown at the uppermost part of the mountain at Hillary Step, a natural obstacle on the ridge leading directly to the summit. Because of the bottleneck of climbers, the three of them realized there was no way they could make the summit by two. So Stuart, Lou and John decided to come down, and as they came by me, standing alone, getting colder and colder on the Balcony, they said, “Well, come on down with us.” “Uh, I’ve really put myself in a box here,” I answered. “I’ve promised Hall I will stay put. We have no radio, so I have no way to tell him that I’m leaving. It would be as if I never honored that commitment at all. I just don’t think I can do that now.” They said good-bye and continued on down. Three wise men. In retrospect I clearly should have joined them. But I didn’t then sense I was in any imminent danger. It was a perfect day. Also, even though I knew that I was not going to climb the mountain that day, I still hated to give up. To go down with them would be to absolutely concede I’d failed.