Reinhold Messner Quotes

All the Yeti footprints are all the same bear. The Yeti isn’t a fantastic figure. The Yeti is reality.

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

Before kids, I was really going to the limit. Afterwards, I was approaching the limit but then maybe turning around.

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.

The true alpinist doesn’t want any infrastructure, he wants to go into the wild. And the odds of getting killed there are relatively high. And most people are sensible enough not to want that.

My aim is not just to help preserve what is left of mountain life, but to create a centre where people can study and learn about it.

For years I was a rock climber and nothing else. I went to school, yes, and university, yes, but in my heart I was a rock climber.

Look, I do not control alpinism. But maybe I was too successful. Many in the mountaineering scene – journalists, second-rate climbers, lecturers, so-called historians – had a problem with me for many years.

To me, it’s just not that important whether someone climbs the Eigerwand in ten hours or in three.

I am my own home, and my handkerchief is my flag.

On your own, relying on yourself, you will never feel you are stronger than the mountain, and your respect for the peak grows.

The Slovenians are the very best climbers in the world.

Mountains are not fair or unfair – they are dangerous.

I have the feeling that behind a certain dimension we cannot anymore see, understand, feel, smell, hear – nothing. What people are calling God I am not defining, but I am a ‘possibilitiest.’

Traditional alpinism is to go where the others are not going and to be self-reliant.

I left many different mountains but always the gods gave me a chance to go back. I was always going with a quiet foot.

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.

Climbing is not a competition, and you cannot talk in terms of ‘greatest,’ it means nothing.

My father had been a Wehrmacht officer in the second world war and was a violent and damaged man.

There are periods on the mountain when you exist between living and dying, sometimes for days. I went through that with my brother on Nanga Parbat. It is very difficult, but it is the most intense experience. And always after such experiences, when I was back among people, I felt I had been reborn.

People don’t like reality, they like crazy stories.

The art of climbing is the art of survival. The best climber is the man or woman going in the most crazy places but surviving.

Traditional alpinism is slowly disappearing. It is becoming sport, indoors on small walls with holds where you cannot really fall.

This is one of my definitions of mountaineering: to go where others do not.

There is no joy involved in climbing mountains, there is simply the challenge, the self-invented challenge, the play.

For me, climbing has always been about adventure and that involves difficulties, danger and exposure, so I deliberately set out to climb with as little equipment as possible.

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.

Each mountain in the Dolomites is like a piece of art.

I am not made for lonely expeditions. In the sixties, I climbed during the day so I wouldn’t have to be alone. I finally learned to stay up for weeks in the high altitude all by my own without being afraid.

I became famous for the fact that I would break many, many limits. People said, ‘He does all these crazy things.’ But oddly it was a crazy thing only because scientists and climbers said, ‘Everest and the 8,000-meter peaks without oxygen – impossible. Messner is becoming sick in his head.’

Crossing the Gobi was a real milestone for me.

Anyone who ever witnessed Ueli Steck flying up the Eigerwand would know that he was always in control of his actions. He was always moving with immense precision and a sense of safety.

I was 5 when I went up my first 10,000 ft mountain, with my parents, and I have been climbing ever since.

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.

Fame is very heavy. When there are large crowds, I’m unable to handle it.

First, I am afraid to die and I love to live. But an adventure is only an adventure when there is the threat of dying.

An account of an expedition is not a novel. Therefore an authentic account can never be given, let alone written down by someone who was not present.

The art of climbing is to go where you go knowing that you could die, but you don’t die. That is adventure.

In the West, the art of rock climbing is growing because it has to do with less risk, good muscles. But the people seeking high goals in high places are in Eastern Europe, and they reach their goals because they are willing to suffer more.

Once you lose your credibility, you can never restore it.

I can’t tell people to love mountains. They have to find their own way.

Out of all the climbers of this generation, I was the one who became known to the larger public. Many of them – not all of them, but many of them – understood they had only one chance to use me for their personal gain. And it’s very easy to use me.

I started the whole ‘Into Thin Air’ thing – nothing I’m proud of.

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

Traditional alpinism is to go where the others are not going and to be self-reliant.

I go to the wild mountains where I am responsible for myself. Step by step I am making sure that I don’t die.

I had no ghost writers for the books – I wrote every line myself.

I go to the mountains for an adventure and each time I pray I will get up and down again.

I like Nietzsche. I quote him in many of my books. He was born 100 years before me.

In climbing there is no question of right or wrong. Moral right or wrong, that is a religious question, they have nothing to do with anarchical activity, and classical mountaineering is a completely anarchical activity.