Enslavement to your own weakness - be it an addiction to alcohol, or to a woman or to fame - it's degrading, and it means losing your dignity and your freedom.

The most significant dimension of freedom is the freedom from one's own ego - in other words, from the feeling that I am the center of everything

Great effort, fear and suffering sweet all the worthless chaff out of us.

Isn't a person who can live on nothing much stronger? I try to nurture that transformation in myself.

Difficult struggle in mountaineering is our rise above himself, is the voice of freedom.

Other extremely alluring traits in people are simplicity and naturalness. Simplicity and naturalness are never painfully obvious qualities, and yet which I come across them in a person, I get this sense of a firm foundation and of a direct access to truth.

I see one single suitable role for my life's work: for it to be a gift to others.