If you have a high-way on Everest, you don't meet the mountain. If everything is prepared, and you have a guide who is responsible for your security, you cannot meet the mountain. Meeting mountains is only possible if you . . . are out there in self-sufficiency.

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.

...seen from above, landscapes are made up of mountains and watercourses. Just as a transparent model of the human body consists of a framework of bone and a network of arteries, the earth's crust is structured in mountain ridges, river, creeks, and gullies.

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

Bolts are the murder of the impossible.

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

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.