Echoes

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! To behold this alone is worth the pains of any excursion a thousand times over.

He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.

Reaching the summit of a mountain gives great satisfaction, but nothing for me has been more rewarding in life than the result of our climb on Everest, when we have devoted ourselves to the welfare of our Sherpa friends.

We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.

I had ambition not only to go farther than anyone had done before, but as far as it was possible for man to go.

And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not.

I whose ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go.

Mountains do not lack the qualities of mountains. Therefore they always abide in ease and always walk. Do not doubt mountains' walking.

The green mountains are always walking. If you doubt mountains' walking, you do not know your own walking.

I set out alone, having neither fellow-traveller in whose companionship I might find cheer, nor caravan whose party I might join, but swayed by an overmastering impulse within me and a desire long-cherished in my bosom to visit these illustrious sanctuaries.

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life — no disgrace, no calamity — which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes.

I don't know if I particularly want to be remembered for anything. I have enjoyed great satisfaction from my climb of Everest and my trips to the poles. But there's no doubt, either, that my most worthwhile things have been the building of schools and medical clinics. That has given me more satisfaction than a footprint on a mountain.

Great is this force of memory, excessive great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber! Who ever sounded the bottom thereof? Yet is this a power of mine, and belongs unto my nature; nor do I myself comprehend all that I am.

Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it is possible for man to go.

The mountains are calling and I must go.

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself.

It's kind of fun to do the impossible.

Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto. (I am a man; nothing human is alien to me.)

Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, / If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.

Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.

Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive.

Never did I think so much, never did I realize my own existence so much, never was I so much alive, so much myself, as in those journeys which I made alone and on foot.

The explorers of the past were great men and we should honour them. But let us not forget that their spirit lives on. It is still not hard to find a man who will adventure for the sake of a dream or one who will search, for the pleasure of searching, not for what he may find.

The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows: empty, yet inexhaustible. The more it is worked, the more it yields. Many words count for little — hold fast to the center.

Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science. With increasing distance our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly. Eventually we reach the dim boundary—the utmost limits of our telescopes. There, we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial.