Quotes About Climbing

There is a tragic kind of joke. You really can't keep a man down - good but often otherwise - because history's mechanics are built to keep him climbing toward the top. Somehow, Icarus gets to be reborn as Iron Man.

The thing with physical preparation is I have tons of friends who train at a really high level and who can give me advice. But with mental training, I don't really know anybody who has a much better mind for climbing, I guess, so I don't really know where I would go. It's not really a limiting factor for me.

Climbing, simply and joyfully, is the way I love the world.

Undoubtedly, the mind is restless and hard to control But it can be trained by constant practice and by freedom from desire." - B.K.S. Iyengar. Climbing is really great, we all love climbing. But what's interesting to me is what happens in my head or in my life because of it. Ultimately, I think climbing is a vehicle for exploration - of the world, of the self.

As a free solo climber, when trying extremely difficult or dangerous movements on rock for the first time, I try it first with the safety of a rope.

I felt strong enough to go back down to piece together the exposed, powerful moves on the second pitch of the headwall, the "boulder problem pitch.

The darkness hid the wild exposure, and I was surprised to feel totally relaxed, climbing much faster and more efficiently than I had hoped.

I happily claim expertise in no single aspect of climbing, which is what has kept the passion burning hot all these years.

I think it's possible to climb the Dawn Wall in a single day. No matter what, it would be really, really hard.

I remember when I started climbing more seriously. That was when I was six years old.

If you like the outdoors, Colorado is a big adventure playground for adults: it's great for skiing, cycling, climbing, and hiking.

I discovered and fell in love with skiing long before I started to climb. Skiing was really my first calling. As a kid, I grew up skiing in jeans in Minnesota.

We clambered for hours up vast, perpendicular slopes, over clattering scree and lumpy tussocks, round towering citadels of rock, and emerged at length into a cold, bleak, lofty nether world so remote and forbidding that even the sheep were startled to see us.

Fading, fading: strength beyond hope and despair climbing the third stair. Lord, I am not worthy Lord, I am not worthy but speak the word only.

They don't have to be big goals. A small one each day. They're like handholds and toeholds as you climb the bigger mountain. Ultimately, you will get to the top of the mountain, but in the moment you only need to focus on the next ledge.

The reason cats climb is so that they can look down on almost every other animal — it's also the reason they hate birds.

Weinberg, whom Oppenheimer had come to regard as one of his brightest students, observed that mathematical formulas were like temporary hand-holds for a rock-climber. Each hand-hold more or less dictates the position of the next hand-hold. "A record of that," Weinberg said, "is a record of a particular climb. It gives you very little of the shape of the rock.

I joined 'Meru' midstream after my co-director Jimmy Chin had already filmed the 2008 and 2011 climbs.

I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before—so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them.

You can show up at Everest having never really climbed before, because it's like hiking, basically. You can't show up on Meru and start up the thing unless you have years and years of experience. Climbing and spending time on the mountains is really the only way you can train.

We've climbed in 60- to 75-kilometer-an-hour wind conditions without ropes, and yes we put in fixed lines when we can because of the safety. But it's all calculated risk and you have to be so flexible in doing this project, and that's why we've been so successful. We always climb with what we have.

I do yoga. I meditate, and when I'm not climbing, I focus on breathing deeply all day long.

Seven years ago, when I started free soloing long, hard routes in Yosemite - climbing without a rope, gear or a partner - I did it because it seemed like the purest, most elegant way to scale big walls. Climbing, especially soloing, felt like a grand adventure, but I never dreamed it could be a profession.

Yosemite has the most impressive and accessible granite big walls in the world. The rock is amazing. And because of that, it's been the mecca for climbing in the U.S. - and the world to a large degree - for all of climbing history. It's the place to test yourself against the historic routes of the past.