Reinhold Messner

Explorer

1944-09-17

Quotes by Reinhold Messner

• After every few steps, we huddle over our ice axes mouths agape, struggling for sufficient breath to keep our muscles going.... at a height of 8800 metres, we can no longer keep on our feet while we rest. We crumple to our knees, clutching our axes.... Every ten or fifteen steps we collapse into the snow to rest, then crawl on again.

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• After every few steps, we huddle over our ice axes mouths agape, struggling for sufficient breath to keep our muscles going.... at a height of 8800 metres, we can no longer keep on our feet while we rest. We crumple to our knees, clutching our axes.... Every ten or fifteen steps we collapse into the snow to rest, then crawl on again.

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• I am not so proud to climb all the 8,000-meter peaks, but I was proud to climb Nanga Parbat solo. That was the most elegant thing I did.

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• I'm a storyteller. I do this for the next generations. They have to know what traditional alpinism is all about.

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• When I held in my hands the remains of Gunther, I had a strong feeling, like a phantom pain of an amputee.

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• I would never bring a flag on the summit. If somebody is climbing for a country he is not normal, he is sick.

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• My father blamed me for my brother Gunther's death, for not bringing him home. He died in an avalanche as we descended from the summit of Nanga Parbat, one of the 14 peaks over 8,000m, in 1970. Gunther and I did so much together. It was difficult for my father to understand what it was like up there.

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• I am not so famous. I'm known in a few countries like Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland and around the Alps. Some climbers in Beijing know my name, and some in America, but I am not really famous. It's very relative, my fame.

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• Climbing is all about freedom, the freedom to go beyond all the rules and take a chance, to experience something new, to gain insight into human nature.

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• Gunther and I always shared the work. Each of us carried his own sleeping bag and tent, and porters carried the rest, until the highest camp, when we were on our own. Nobody helped us up there.

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• I have a very different fear if I'm all alone in the summit area of Mount Everest and if I know that there is nothing below me, no Sherpa, no tent, no rope.

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• I started the whole 'Into Thin Air' thing - nothing I'm proud of.

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• Adventure has to do with private, personal experiences. But, the possibilities, there are millions of unclimbed mountains - I have seen in the Eastern part of Tibet, mountains 6,000-6,500 meters high, vertical walls twice as tall as the Eiger... but nobody is going there, because they aren't 8,000-meter peaks.

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• Alpinism means you go by yourself with your own responsibility, knowing that you could die. But Everest now is more like ski tourism: preparing the piste, helping people go up, setting oxygen bottles near the summit.

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• Ninety per cent of the tourists climbing big mountains are on 10 mountains - and one million mountains in the world are empty.

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• The best climbers no longer go to the 8000ers, but to the most difficult mountains in the world which are 6000 or 7000-meter-peaks. There they find any kind of playground. But it is a pity that the really good climbers have fewer opportunities to finance their expeditions because so much attention is taken away by the Everest tourists.

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• A tourist follows a trail; a mountaineer finds one.

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• Mountains are not fair or unfair - they are dangerous.

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• The mountains are dangerous. Only an unintelligent person will say they are not dangerous.

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• The museum at Ortles is dedicated to the world of ice so we wanted visitors to feel like they were inside a glacier.

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