Quotes About Achievement

My goal is to get the belt, the UFC belt.

It's a dream of mine to win the division's belt.

When I was young, I used to dream about seeing myself with the world title, with the WBC belt.

I want to have a belt somewhere.

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.

With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill," Hall observed. "The trick is to get back down alive.

Most climbers aren't in fact deranged, they're just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.

Mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.

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)

Having stumbled upon a tolerable career, for the first time in my life I was actually living above the poverty line. My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.

Once Everest was determined to be the highest summit on earth, it was only a matter of time before people decided that Everest needed to be climbed.

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.

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

But then suddenly there was no place higher to go. I felt my cracked lips stretch into a painful grin. I was on top of the Devil's Thumb. Fittingly, the summit was a surreal, malevolent place, an improbably slender wedge of rock and rime no wider than a file cabinet. It did not encourage loitering. As I straddled the highest point, the south face fell away beneath my right boot for twenty-five hundred feet; beneath my left boot the north face dropped twice that distance.

Because it is there

One of the differences between us was that Marc wanted very badly to climb the Eiger, while I wanted very badly only to have climbed the Eiger. Marc, understand, is at that age when the pituitary secretes an overabundance of those hormones that mask the subtler emotions, such as fear. He tends to confuse things like life-or-death climbing with fun.

This forms the nub of a dilemma 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.

I looked down. Descent was totally unappetizing.… Too much labor, too many sleepless nights, and too many dreams had been invested to bring us this far. We couldn't come back for another try next weekend. To go down now, even if we could have, would be descending to a future marked by one huge question: what might have been? Thomas F. Hornbein     Everest: The West Ridge A

From elementary school through high school, my siblings and I were hectored to excel in every class, to win medals in science fairs, to be chosen princess of the prom, to win election to student government. Thereby and only thereby, we learned, could we expect to gain admission to the right college, which in turn would get us into Harvard Medical School: life's one sure path to meaningful success and lasting happiness.

You'll never feel the joy of movement if you're struggling. You've got to get good enough and strong enough to reach the point where you can feel this quintessential lightness. - John Gill

If someone like Pete Schoening was the equivalent of a major-league baseball star, my fellow clients and I were like a ragtag collection of pretty decent small-town softball players who'd bribed their way into the World Series.

the notion that climbers are merely adrenaline junkies chasing a righteous fix is a fallacy, at least in the case of Everest. What I was doing up there had almost nothing in common with bungee jumping or skydiving or riding a motorcycle at 120 miles per hour.

Maybe, I think, I don't have to be great at this; maybe I just have to be good enough.

The money itself didn't seem terribly important to Fischer. He cared little for material things but he hungered for respect and he was acutely aware that in the culture in which he lived, money was the prevailing gauge of success.