Mount 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

I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read." This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.

I think Mount Everest is gorgeous, too, but that doesn’t mean I have any intention of trying to climb it

The only thing you'll find on the summit of Mount Everest is a divine view. The things that really matter lie far below.

How will we get back up?" I worried. "I have a different route in mind for our return trip." "Does it involve stairs?" I asked hopefully. "No." "Of course not. How silly of me. And for our return adventure we will be scaling the side of Mount Everest, hiking boots to be provided by our trusty sponsor, Barrons Books and Baubles.

You need mountains, long staircases don't make good hikers.

People do not wander around and then find themselves at the top of Mount Everest.

Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics and others with a shaky hold on reality.

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.

Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there: prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment, in the boldest style imaginable.

People ask me, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is of no use.'There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron... 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 live. That is what life means and what life is for.

It wasn’t a gun wound. I just fell. (Zarek) No offense, but you’d have to fall of Mount Everest to have those kinds of wounds. (Astrid) Yeah, maybe next time I’ll remember to take my climbing gear with me. (Zarek)

Why do people move? What makes them uproot and leave everything they've known for a great unknown beyond the horizon? Why climb this Mount Everest of formalities that makes you feel like a beggar? Why enter this jungle of foreignness where everything is new, strange and difficult? The answer is the same the world over: people move in hope of a better life.

It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier. Climbing was a magnificient activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them.

sometimes courage isn’t climbing Mount Everest or changing the world. Sometimes your mountain to climb is made up of weekdays and months, made up of pushing yourself forward even when you want to nestle into the past. Sometimes changing the world means changing your world as gradually as you need to, as gently as you heal, because sometimes courage isn’t made up of war and bloodshed; sometimes courage isn’t made of combat. Sometimes courage is a quiet fight, a dim softness within you, that flickers even on your darkest days and reminds you that you are strong, that you are growing—that there is hope.

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.

We were too tired to help. Above 8,000 meters is not a place where people can afford morality

Alone on the summit of Mount Everest.

I wake up feeling like I spent the last three days in a massage parlor. My muscles are relaxed, and I feel refreshed, like I could climb Mount Everest or build an ark or cure the world of minivans.

If you're bumming out, you're not gonna get to the top, so as long as we're up here we might as well make a point of grooving. (Quoting Scott Fischer)

I was inspired to write (Life Continues) to tell people dealing with MS or any other illness that if opening your eyes, or getting out of bed, or holding a spoon, or combing your hair is the daunting Mount Everest you climb today, that is okay.

Climbing Mount Everest is more satisfying than standing at the top; flirting and foreplay are more exciting than having an orgasm; and conducting groundbreaking lab experiments is more interesting than receiving praise and prizes.

She was climbing Mount Everest and the air was invigorating and wonderful. Even if every second verged on crisis, this was part of living - not just watching from the sidelines.

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.

...I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of use were probably seeking, above else, something like a state of grace.

Thus the slopes of Everest are littered with corpses.

Mount Everest is about as tall as a mountain on Earth can grow before the lower rock layers succumb to their own plasticity under the mountain’s weight.

In bed, I could climb in, if you ever rest. Then I could mount you like Everest.

Above the comforts of Base Camp, the expedition in fact became an almost Calvinistic undertaking. The ratio of misery to pleasure was greater by an order of magnitude than any mountain I'd been on; I quickly came to understand that climbing Everest was primarily about enduring pain. And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking above all else, something like a state of grace.

I told you, we haven't had sex! It was just a kiss." Like the Viper was just a car, and Mount Everest was just a hill.

Ego can climb mount everest, not mount Kailash. Because Kailash is inside you. Climbing it means end of Ego. Why would ego go towards its own end? Ego is just happy listening to stories about Kailash and Shiva.

Food for thought: Every dead body on Mount Everest was once a highly motivated person. Stay lazy my friends. It may save your life one day.

It seems more than a little patronizing for Westerners to lament the loss of the good old days when life in the Khumbu was so much simpler and more picturesque. Most of the people who live in this rugged country seem to have no desire to be severed from the modern world or the untidy flow of human progress. The last thing Sherpas want is to be preserved as specimens in an anthropological museum.

Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?” The mountaineer replied in bemusement, as if the question was ridiculous and the answer obvious, “Because it’s there.” Kira understood then, because why had she wanted to go to university when no one else in her family had been? Why had she chosen law when everyone had told her it would be too hard? Why? To find out if she could do it. Because she wanted to climb that damn mountain. Because it was there.

I didn't doubt the potential value of paying attention to subconscious cues...problem was, my inner voice resembled Chicken Little: it was screaming that I was about to die, but it did that almost every time I laced up my climbing boots.

That fine line between bravery and stupidity is endlessly debated – the difference really doesn’t matter.

My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.

Do you respect someone's right to challenge and discover their true potential?How is a gang-bang any different than risking your life to climb mount Everest?

Why do people move? What makes them uproot and leave everything they've known for a great unknown beyond the horizon? Why climb this Mount Everest of formalities that makes you feel like a beggar? Why enter this jungle of foreignness where everything is new, strange and difficult? The answer is the same the world over: people move in the hope of a better life.

We were like the Mount Everest climbers stepping over frozen corpses from prior climbing disasters in our quest for the summit. Like those climbers, we were motivated by a fear far greater than death—the fear of not reaching the top.

The plain truth is that I knew better but went to Everest anyway. And in doing so I was a party to the death of good people, which is something that is apt to remain on my conscience for a very long time.

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.

Beware the soul-sucking force of “reasonableness.” Otherwise you risk deflating your peaks. Speed bumps are reasonable. Mount Everest is not reasonable.

Why should one bother about the ultimate fate of the universe? One answer to this question is similar to the answer to the question about climbing Mount Everest: because the problem exists. It is in the nature of the human mind to seek incessantly new frontiers of knowledge to explore.

Achieving the summit of a mountain was tangible, immutable, concrete. The incumbent hazards lent the activity a seriousness of purpose that was sorely missing from the rest of my life. I thrilled in the fresh perspective that came from the tipping the ordinary plane of existence on end.

The urge to catalog the myriad blunders in order to “learn from the mistakes” is for the most part an exercise in denial and self-deception.

Never let failure discourage you. Every time you get to the base of a mountain (literal or metaphorical), you're presented with a new opportunity to challenge yourself, to push your limits beyond what you thought possible, to learn from climbers on the trail ahead of you, and to take in some amazing views. Your performance on the mountain you climbed last week or last month or last year doesn't matter - because it's all about what you are doing right now.

The Himalayas are the crowning achievement of the Indo-Australian plate. India in the Oligocene crashed head on into Tibet, hit so hard that it not only folded and buckled the plate boundaries but also plowed into the newly created Tibetan plateau and drove the Himalayas five and a half miles into the sky. The mountains are in some trouble. India has not stopped pushing them, and they are still going up. Their height and volume are already so great they are beginning to melt in their own self-generated radioactive heat. When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in a warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as 20,000 feet below the sea floor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat, I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence; this is the one I would choose: the summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone.

Every day we’re bombarded with information and images—with adolescents in heavy makeup pretending to be grown women as they advertise miraculous creams promising eternal beauty; with the story of an aging couple who climbed Mount Everest to celebrate their wedding anniversary; with new massage gizmos, and pharmacy windows that are chockablock with slimming products; with movies that give an entirely false impression of reality, and books promising fantastic results; with specialists who give advice about how to succeed in life or find inner peace. And all these things make us feel old, make us feel that we’re leading dull, unadventurous lives as our skin grows ever more flaccid, and the pounds pile on irrevocably. And yet we feel obliged to repress our emotions and our desires, because they don’t fit with what we call “maturity.” Choose what information you listen to. Place a filter over your eyes and ears and allow in only things that won’t bring you down, because we have our day-to-day life to do that.

The Pacific is twice the size of the Atlantic, a comparison perhaps too incomprehensible to convey meaning. If in a cartoon, Mount Everest were placed on the floor of the Mariana Trench south of Guam, its peak would fall 6,800 feet short of the surface of the Pacific.

These included the top of Mount Everest and up the chief’s rear passage.

Nikt nie wszedł na Mount Everest chodząc bez celu po okolicy

…but don’t let your mind trick you into not trusting your body, not trusting yourself. Even climbing Mount Everest starts with a single step. You can do this.

An eighty-year-old man has managed to climb Mount Everest. I have enough trouble stepping up on the curb. It isn’t fair.

Every corpse on Mount Everest was once an extremely motivated individual. That's why I love my couch. A couch has never killed anybody.

The true history of the world must always be the history of the few; and as we measure the Himalaya by the height of Mount Everest, we must take the true measure of India from the poets of the Veda, the sages of the Upanishads, the founders of the Vedanta and Sankhya philosophies, and the authors of the oldest law-books, and not from the millions who are born and die in their villages, and who have never for one moment been roused out of their drowsy dream of life.

Technique and ability alone do not get you to the top—it is the willpower that is the most important. This willpower you cannot buy with money or be given by others—it rises from your heart.

The trip from Portland to New York City was like climbing Mount Everest without oxygen. It went on and on, and by the time you reached your destination, there was no sensation left in your extremities.

You climb only because the mountain allows it. If it says wait, then you must wait, and when it allows you to go, then you must struggle and strain in the thin air with all your might. Listening to the mountain and having patience on it are the keys to survival.

Walter Mittys with Everest dreams need to bear in mind that when things go wrong up in the Death Zone--and sooner or later they always do--the strongest guides in the world may be powerless to save a client's life; indeed, as the events of 1996 demonstrated, the strongest guides in the world are sometimes powerless to save even their own lives. Four of my teammates died not so much because Rob Hall's systems were faulty--indeed, nobody's were better--but because on Everest it is the nature of systems to break down with a vengeance.

You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God. Matthew 5, v.2 (The Message Version)

My friend Dick Bass (now in his 70s) has travelled far and wide and had many adventures. His achievements include being the first person to climb the highest peak on each of the seven continents, as well as being the oldest person (by five years) to climb Mount Everest (at the age of 55.) He once told me a story of a plane ride, on which he sat next to a nice man who listened to him go on about the treacherous peaks of Everest and McKinley, the time he almost died in the Himalayas, and his upcoming plan to reclimb Everest. Just before the plane landed, Bass turned to the man sitting next to him and said, ‘After all this, I don’t think I’ve introduced myself. My name is Dick Bass.’ The man shook his hand, and responded, ‘Hi, I’m Neil Armstrong.

The pursuit of science has often been compared to the scaling of mountains, high and not so high. But who amongst us can hope, even in imagination, to scale the Everest and reach its summit when the sky is blue and the air is still, and in the stillness of the air survey the entire Himalayan range in the dazzling white of the snow stretching to infinity? None of us can hope for a comparable vision of nature and of the universe around us. But there is nothing mean or lowly in standing in the valley below and awaiting the sun to rise over Kinchinjunga.

If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxious, ambitious actors, directors, writers and producers to continue their assault on the English language by reducing the vocabularies of their characters to half a dozen words, with one colorful but overused Anglo-Saxon verb and one unbeautiful Anglo-Saxon noun covering just about every situation, then I would like to suggest that they stop and think about this: making millions is not the whole ball game, fellows. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more.

Mount Everest has a “death zone”. When a climber is in that zone, at very high altitude, he’s living on borrowed time. He will almost certainly need a good oxygen supply. All living tissue is starting to die (necrosis) thanks to the cold and the altitude. Unlike climbers, the higher that geniuses ascend, the more invigorated they become, the stronger their flesh and minds become. They experience the opposite of necrosis. They have entered the Life Zone.

The oxygen at the summit of Mount Everest is the same oxygen that has been delicately knit within your lungs; the elements at the bottom of the ocean are dotted like wildflowers along the surface of your skin. Let this reassure you – at the highest and lowest points of life, you were made to endure. You were made to survive.

In any human endeavor, some fraction of its practitioners will be motivated to pursue that activity with such concentrated focus and unalloyed passion that it will consume them utterly. One has to look no further than individuals who feel compelled to devote their lives to becoming concert pianists, say, or climbing Mount Everest. For some, the province of the extreme holds an allure that’s irresistible. And a certain percentage of such fanatics will inevitably fixate on matters of the spirit.

But we can’t control the environment; all we can control is the way we react to it.

Nothing is impossible in this world, all you need is courage and hardwork.

I grew up with an ambition and determination without which I would have been a good deal happier.

Climb Mount Everest with a gorilla on your back and you will understand the impact waste has on your processes

There were no aisles, so to get to the empty cot I had to climb over other senators. The first was Ted Kennedy. He was a big man, and at that moment he looked to me like Mount Everest.

The real flight of this hawk is impending. Still,this bird is yet to be tested for real. Though I have leaped over the seas, well,the entire sky is still remaining to fly. And make sure that ,i am gonna do it with all my heart and all my soul. #loveyoourlife #liveyourlife #hvFUN

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.

It's the hard things in life that hold the most achievement. Would you rather win a small-town race or win the gold at the Olympics? Think of this as the big games, the Mount Everest. Tackle it, conquer it, and bring home the gold.

Along with osmium and platinum, iridium is one of the three heaviest (densest) elements on the Table—two cubic feet of it weighs as much as a Buick, which makes iridium one of the world’s best paperweights, able to defy all known office fans. Iridium is also the world’s most famous smoking gun. A thin layer of it can be found worldwide at the famous Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary† in geological strata, dating from sixty-five million years ago. Not so coincidentally, that’s when every land species larger than a carry-on suitcase went extinct, including the legendary dinosaurs. Iridium is rare on Earth’s surface but relatively common in six-mile metallic asteroids, which, upon colliding with Earth, vaporize on impact, scattering their atoms across Earth’s surface. So, whatever might have been your favorite theory for offing the dinosaurs, a killer asteroid the size of Mount Everest from outer space should be at the top of your list.

There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane -- as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout -- there may be no more potent force than religion. When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, many Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to be expected in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions. Muhammad is not the only prophet whose words have been used to sanction barbarism; history has not lacked for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and even Buddhists who have been motivated by scripture to butcher innocents. Plenty of these religious extremists have been homegrown, corn-fed Americans. Faith-based violence was present long before Osama bin Laden, and it ill be with us long after his demise. Religious zealots like bin Laden, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara, and Dan Lafferty are common to every age, just as zealots of other stripes are. In any human endeavor, some fraction of its practitioners will be motivated to pursue that activity with such concentrated focus and unalloyed passion that it will consume them utterly. One has to look no further than individuals who feel compelled to devote their lives to becoming concert pianists, say, or climbing Mount Everest. For some, the province of the extreme holds an allure that's irresistible. And a certain percentage of such fanatics will inevitably fixate on the matters of the spirit. The zealot may be outwardly motivated by the anticipation of a great reward at the other end -- wealth, fame, eternal salvation -- but the real recompense is probably the obsession itself. This is no less true for the religious fanatic than for the fanatical pianist or fanatical mountain climber. As a result of his (or her) infatuation, existence overflows with purpose. Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic's worldview; a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. A delicious rage quickens his pulse, fueled by the sins and shortcomings of lesser mortals, who are soiling the world wherever he looks. His perspective narrows until the last remnants of proportion are shed from his life. Through immoderation, he experiences something akin to rapture. Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God...

But the point is that is takes real work for a woman to sustain the creation of something outside herself that is not a child. Real will, because we are always going to be tempted in a way men aren’t to wander off the road and find some place to get knocked up so we can relieve ourselves of the burden of trying to figure out what everything in life is really worth, and then, as a reward for this abdication of responsibility, get ourselves worshipped as if we’d climbed Mount Everest when all we’d done was let nature take its course.

There is one type of scientific illustration in which this effect of scale on impression is acknowledged officially, as it were. Geographers who draw sections of mountain ranges will exaggerate the relation of height to width according to a stated proportion. They have found that a true rendering of vertical relationship looks false. Our mind refuses to accept the fact that the distance of 28,000 feet to which Mount Everest soars from sea level is no more than the distance of just over 5 miles which a car traverses in a matter of minutes.

Reinhard Messner hatte einmal nach einer Nahtoderfahrung beim Abstieg vom Mount Everest gesagt, der Vorgang des Sterbens wäre das Leichteste. Schwer wäre es nur vorher. Solange man noch Hoffnung besaesse.Waere aber der feste Entschluss zum Sterben getroffen, ginge alles ganz leicht.

Several authors and editors I respect counseled me not to write the book as quickly as I did; they urged me to wait two or three years and put some distance between me and the expedition in order to gain some crucial perspective. Their advice was sound, but in the end I ignored it - mostly because what happened on the mountain was gnawing my guts out. I thought that writing the book might purge Everest from my life. It hasn't, of course.

My Everest is not your Everest. Your Everest is not mine. We all have an Everest. Each of us. Sometimes the peak is literally Mount Everest but most times it lies deep within us, figuratively occupying a mountainous inner space. It calls us to rise up, to do what we formerly labeled as impossible, and to be who we deeply and desperately want to be. I know that I have found an Everest when my soul furiously pokes me repeatedly until I listen. Heeding this call to passionate adventure of any sort initiates a journey of intense immense proportion that changes every molecule of my being.

Whether your mountain is a literal one or not, I believe that God has put each of us on this planet to live a life that is beyond imagination. I don’t recommend the death zone for everyone, but I do recommend that whatever spot you find yourself in, you discover and climb your personal Mount Everest.

Within those margins is Denali, a 144-square-mile mass of rock, snow, and ice that rises abruptly from a 2,000-foot plateau, soaring 18,000 feet from base to summit, the greatest vertical relief of any mountain on Earth, with the exception of the Hawaiian seamount Mauna Kea, the bulk of which lies beneath the Pacific Ocean. In comparison, Mount Everest, though 29,029 feet above sea level, rests on the 17,000-foot-high Tibetan Plateau and rises just 12,000 feet from base to summit. A similar plateau boosts the Andes; without those geologic booster seats, those peaks all would lie in Denali’s shadow.

I hate this little town. It's so small, too small. Everything about it is small. The people here have small ideas, small dreams; they all want to marry each other and live here forever.' 'What do you want to do?' I asked. 'I want to leave as soon as I can. I think I was born with a suitcase.' ... 'Where do you want to go?' I asked. 'Everywhere. I want to walk on the Great Wall of China, I want to walk to the top of the pyramids in Egypt, I want to swim in every ocean, I want to climb Mount Everest, I want to go on an African safari, I want to ride a dog sled in Antarctica. I want all of it; every single piece of everything.

I do understand. Every day we’re bombarded with information and images—with adolescents in heavy makeup pretending to be grown women as they advertise miraculous creams promising eternal beauty; with the story of an aging couple who climbed Mount Everest to celebrate their wedding anniversary; with new massage gizmos, and pharmacy windows that are chockablock with slimming products; with movies that give an entirely false impression of reality, and books promising fantastic results; with specialists who give advice about how to succeed in life or find inner peace. And all these things make us feel old, make us feel that we’re leading dull, unadventurous lives as our skin grows ever more flaccid, and the pounds pile on irrevocably. And yet we feel obliged to repress our emotions and our desires, because they don’t fit with what we call “maturity.” Choose what information you listen to. Place a filter over your eyes and ears and allow in only things that won’t bring you down, because we have our day-to-day life to do that. Do you think I don’t get judged and criticized at work? Well, I do—a lot! But I’ve decided to hear only the things that encourage me to improve, the things that help me correct my mistakes. Otherwise, I will just pretend I can’t hear the other stuff or block it out.

Trekking means a travelling experience with a thrilling excitement.

How much more interior can you get, after all, than the interior of bones? It's the center of the center of things. If marrow were a geological formation, it would be magma roiling under the earth's mantle. If it were a plant, it would be a delicate moss that grows only in the highest crags of Mount Everest, blooming with tiny white flowers for three days in the Nepalese spring. If it were a memory, it would be your first one, your most painful and repressed one, the one that has made you who you are.

Everest is a harsh and hostile immensity. Whoever challenges it declares war. He must mount his assault with the skill and ruthlessness of a military operation. And when the battle ends, the mountain remains unvanquished. There are no true victors, only survivors.

A villain. The enemy. Sandor watched Sophie tug on her eyelashes—her nervous habit, back in full force. “Nothing is going to happen,” he promised, tucking her blond hair behind her ear with a surprisingly gentle touch for a seven-foot-tall goblin warrior. It definitely helped having Sandor back at her side—especially after almost losing him during the battle on Mount Everest. And Sandor wasn’t the only goblin at Foxfire anymore. Each of the six wings in the main campus building had been assigned its own patrol, with two additional squadrons keeping watch over the sprawling grounds. The Council had also added security throughout the Lost Cities. They had to. The ogres were still threatening war. And in the three weeks since Sophie and her friends had returned from hiding with the Black Swan, the Neverseen had scorched the main gate of the Sanctuary and broken into the registry in Atlantis. Sophie could guess what the rebels had hoped to gain from the elves’ secret animal preserve—they obviously didn’t know that she’d convinced the Council to set the precious alicorns free. But the registry attack remained a mystery. The Councillors kept careful records on every elf ever born, and no one would tell her if any files had been altered or stolen. A bubble popped on Sophie’s head, and Sandor caught the box of Prattles that had been hovering inside. “If you’re going to eat these, I should check them first,” he told her. Sandor’s wide, flat nose scented no toxins in the nutty candy, but he insisted on examining the pin before handing them over. Every box of Prattles came with a special collectible inside, and in the past, the Black

Evenings were peaceful, smoke settling in the quiet air to soften the dusk, lights twinkling on the ridge we would camp on tomorrow, clouds dimming the outline of our pass for the day after. Growing excitement lured my thoughts again and again to the West Ridge…. There was loneliness, too, as the sun set, but only rarely now did doubts return. Then I felt sinkingly as if my whole life lay behind me. Once on the mountain I knew (or trusted) that this would give way to total absorption with the task at hand. But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find what I really sought was something I had left behind.

The Abominable Snowman has arrived,” he said to Milo. “If I’m not as clean as most abominable snowmen are, it is because I was kidnapped as a child from the slopes of Mount Everest, and taken as a slave to a bordello in Rio de Janeiro, where I have been cleaning the unspeakably filthy toilets for the past fifty years. A visitor to our whipping room there screamed in a transport of agony and ecstasy that there was to be an arts festival in Midland City. I escaped down a rope of sheets taken from a reeking hamper. I have come to Midland City to have myself acknowledged, before I die, as the great artist I believe myself to be.

Most people would not attempt to climb Mount Everest on their own. Typically, climbers will look toward Sherpas, who have served as guides for generations in Nepal, high in the Himalayas. They help climbers prepare and show them along the routes that will get them to the top. They are seasoned and know every details of the trails. But your guide is even more essentail if you are to make it back down safely. Coming down the mountain can be the most perilous part. You're tired. Your defenses are down. You may very well fall at the critical moment. You need that guide. As you approach retirement, you are moving to a different phase of life. You are descending the mountain.

. . .There is nothing to complain of. . .we had a gorgeous day for the climb, almost windless and brilliantly fine, yet we were unable to get to the summit. So we have no excuse - we have been beaten in fair fight; beaten by the height of the mountain, and by our own shortness of breath. But the fight was worth it, worth it every time, and we shall cherish the privilege of defeat by the world's greatest mountain.

When it came to "getting away from it all," there really weren’t many places quite like the top of the tallest mountain in the world. He glanced around the summit, noting the other reason why he enjoyed coming up here. It was tradition for every expedition to the top of Everest to leave something behind—a small token or marker indicating their successful climb to the famous peak. Each one was different and each one seemed to reflect the personality of the party it represented: small flags and banners with the hand-written names of climbers past, a used oxygen canister, a spare glove, even a small metal lunchbox with (Clark noted with a small smile) a picture of Superman on the cover. To Clark, each of these markers indicated the pinnacle of human achievement, the fulfilled promise of the best the human race had to offer. And today, it represented something else as well: man’s ability to conquer the harsh reality of nature… a point in stark contrast to the previous night’s activities. This set were Sherpa prayer flags, each displaying a symbol, not of a distant god or mythological beast, but denoting some aspect of the enlightened human mind: compassion, perfect action, fearlessness. His thoughts turned to another example of the peak of human achievement, of what one man with drive, desire and dedication could accomplish without the benefit of superpowers or metagene enhancement. One that held a much more personal meaning to Clark. Bruce.

A personal credo can help you stay true to yourself and to your beliefs even in extreme circumstances, when risks to your physical and mental well-being might threaten your values. What’s your credo? What is your purpose? What do you strive to do daily? How do you think people would currently describe you as a person? As a leader? How do you want people to describe you? What values are most important to you? Know what you stand for. And know what you would fight for. How do you want to be remembered when you leave this earth?

La 18.20, Cotter l-a contactat pe Hall si i-a spus ca Jan Arnold sunase din Christchurch si astepta sa i se faca legatura. - Imediat, a spus Rob.Am gura uscata. Vreau sa inghit niste zapada inainte sa vorbesc cu ea. A revenit putin mai tarziu si a spus incet, cu o voce sparta si foarte distorsionata: - Buna, draga mea. Sper ca esti in pat si ca ti-e cald. Ce faci? - Nu pot sa-ti spun cat ma gandesc la tine! a raspuns Arnold. Pari mult mai bine decat ma asteptam. Ti-e cald dragule? - Avand in vedere altitudinea si imprejurimile, mi-e destul de bine, a spus Hall, facand tot posibilul sa nu o ingrijoreze. - Cum iti sunt picioarele? - Nu mi-am dat jos bocancii ca sa ma uit, dar cred ca am niste degeraturi. - De-abia astept sa te fac bine dupa ce vii acasa, a spus Arnold. Sunt convinsa ca o sa fii salvat. Sa nu te simti singur. Iti trimit toate gandurile mele bune! - Te iubesc. Somn usor, draga mea. Te rog sa nu-ti faci prea multe griji, i-a spus Hall sotiei sale inainte sa inchida. Acestea au fost ultimele cuvinte pe care le-am auzit de la el. (ultima convorbire dintre Rob Hall si sotia sa)

In drum spre varf, Viesturs a trecut pe langa cadravele inghetate ale lui Fischer si Hall. -Jean (sotia lui Fischer) si Jan(sotia lui Hall) m-au rugat sa le aduc obiecte personale, poveste rusinat Viesturs. Stiam ca Scott isi poarta verigheta atarnata la gat si voiam sa i-o duc lui Jeannie, dar n-am putut sa sap pe langa corpul lui neinsufletit. Pur si simplu nu am fost in stare. In loc sa ia suvenire, la coborare Viesturs s-a asezat langa Fischer si a stat cateva minute singur cu el. "Hei, Scott, ce faci?" l-a intrebat Ed cu tristete pe prietenul lui. "Ce s-a intamplat?

For the first time in months almost no wind blasted the summit, but the snow on the upper mountain was thigh deep, making for slow, exhausting progress. Kropp bulled his way relentlessly upward through the drifts, however, and by two o’clock Thursday afternoon he’d reached 28,700 feet, just below the South Summit. But even though the top was no more than sixty minutes above, he decided to turn around, believing that he would be too tired to descend safely if he climbed any higher. “To turn around that close to the summit …,” Hall mused with a shake of his head on May 6 as Kropp plodded past Camp Two on his way down the mountain. “That showed incredibly good judgment on young Göran’s part. I’m impressed—considerably more impressed, actually, than if he’d continued climbing and made the top.” Over the previous month, Rob had lectured us repeatedly about the importance of having a predetermined turnaround time on our summit day—in our case it would probably be 1:00 P.M., or 2:00 at the very latest—and abiding by it no matter how close we were to the top. “With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill,” Hall observed. “The trick is to get back down alive.

After Guru Rinpoche subdued Tseringma, he pursued her four younger sisters. One by one, they repented and became Buddhist deities, moving to mountains of their own. Miyolangsangma patrols the summit of Everest on the back of a tigress. Now the goddess of prosperity, her face shines like 24-carat gold. Thingi Shalsangma, her body a pale shade of blue, became the goddess of healing after galloping on a zebra to the top of Shishapangma, a 26,289-foot peak in Tibet. Chopi Drinsangma, with a face in perpetual blush, became the goddess of attraction. She chose a deer instead of a zebra and settled on Kanchenjunga, a 28,169-foot peak in Nepal. The final sister—Takar Dolsangma, the youngest, with a green face—was a hard case. She mounted a turquoise dragon and fled northward to the land of three borders. In the modern Rolwaling folklore, this is Pakistan. Guru Rinpoche chased after her and eventually cornered her on a glacier called the Chogo Lungma. Takar Dolsangma appeared remorseful and, spurring her dragon, ascended K2, accepting a new position as the goddess of security. Although Guru Rinpoche never doubted her sincerity, maybe he should have: Takar Dolsangma, it seems, still enjoys the taste of human flesh.