Mountains Quotes

The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, acclaimed as the most brilliant and perceptive reporter of his time, writes in Travels with Herodotus that with every new town visited, with every new foreign word learnt, the traveller experiences small, almost imperceptible personal changes. Wherever you go becomes part of you and the person who returns home is never the same as before departing. Knowing new people is in many ways like travelling, and those who you meet along your road become part of your existence too.

~ Mateo Cabello

The mountains were so wild and so stark and so very beautiful that I wanted to cry. I breathed in another wonderful moment to keep safe in my heart.

~ Jane Wilson-Howarth

Boredom presents a very real, if insidious peril. To quote Blaine Harden from the Washington post:“Boredom kills, and those it does not kill, it cripples, and those it does not cripple, it bleeds like a leech, leaving its victims pale, insipid, and brooding. Examples abound...Rats kept in comfortable isolation quickly become jumpy, irritable, and aggressive. Their bodies twitch, their tails grow scaly. The backcountry traveler, then, in addition to developing such skills as the use of a map and compass, or the prevention and treatment of blisters, must prepare mentally and materially to cope with boredom, lest his tail grow scaly.

~ Jon Krakauer

… everything was fresh, green and particularly beautiful. Afternoon light, filtering between remnants of monsoon clouds, picked out gullies and spot-lit patches of forest and scrub on the convoluted ridges of the rim of the Kathmandu Valley. Or, after a rainstorm, wisps of clouds clung to the trees as if scared to let go. Behind, himals peeked out shyly between the clouds.

~ Jane Wilson-Howarth

Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny.

~ Hilaire Belloc

When standing in the middle of the marvelous mountains and deep forests, in the earthy smell of all beginnings and endings, I often find myself asking what I have if all my possessions were taken away. Without money, car, house; or power and fame, if there are any, who am I? In that very moment, being away from the external voices and left alone in nature, I find my answer.

~ Zi Nguyen

The power of such a mountain is so great and yet so subtle that, without compulsion, people are drawn to it from near and far, as if by the force of some invisible magnet…this worshipful or religious attitude is not impressed by scientific facts, like figures of altitude, which are foremost in the mind of modern man. Nor is it motivated by the urge to ‘conquer’ the mountain.

~ Anagarika Govinda

Live your life each day as you would climb a mountain. An occasional glance toward the summit keeps the goal in mind, but many beautiful scenes are to be observed from each new vantage point.

~ Harold B. Melchart

If I am always standing at the bottom of the mountain longingly looking up, in all probability it is because I have heeded the pillaging dogma of mediocrity which persistently tells me that the dream is not worth the climb.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Perhaps there’s no better act of simplification than climbing a mountain. For an afternoon, a day, or a week, it’s a way of reducing a complicated life into a simple goal. All you have to do is take one step at a time, place one foot in front of the other, and refuse to turn back until you’ve given everything you have.

~ Ken Ilgunas

Feeling LOW? Go on mountains.

~ Prajakta Mhadnak

So easy to go sailing off this road. A wonder more folks didn't. All that space, waiting.

~ S.m. Hulse

With great abilities come great responsibilities; great power comes with great assignments.With great age comes great reasoning; great actions come great experience.With great battles come great victories; great trees come with great tap roots.However, if a little faith can move great mountains, what then will a great faith do? Mysterious things... I guess

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.

~ Robert Macfarlane

Do you know how fast you are walking? ... To get a close estimate, count the number of steps you take in a minute and divide by 30... :)

~ Albina Fabiani

Trust me, there are things in this mountain that will make your jaw bounce off the floor.

~ Jaleigh Johnson

People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

Approaching the Start of Civil ExamsPerhaps I was once a young Chinese scholarapproaching the start of civil exams,my mind grown weary and sad from seclusionwith books on syntax and poetic style.All that I knew were the mist-covered mountainsand sweet white blossoms of mountain applesthat grew in the valleys of my province.But I had been gone over six yearsbusy with studies in the Heavenly Cityempty and thin despite my work.I showed my verses to an older poetwho told me a truth I longed to believe:all knowledge is futile and barrenwhich does not open the love of your friends.

~ Jim Chapson

Across the oceans, in the middle of the rivers and at the peak of mountains; nothing can ever change my feelings for you.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

With a mighty mind, you can conquer every mountain.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There are no mighty mountains for the universe, because there are no mountains for the universe, no rivers, no sun and no clouds! There is only universe for the universe, just a single entity!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

my lovefor youwill always belike a mountain stream.quiet. persistent. continuous.

~ Sanober Khan

We can only climb the mountains because there’s a valley that makes the mountain a mountain.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Phædrus wrote a letter from India about a pilgrimage to holy Mount Kailas, the source of the Ganges and the abode of Shiva, high in the Himalayas, in the company of a holy man and his adherents.He never reached the mountain. After the third day he gave up, exhausted, and the pilgrimage went on without him. He said he had the physical strength but that physical strength wasn’t enough. He had the intellectual motivation but that wasn’t enough either. He didn’t think he had been arrogant but thought that he was undertaking the pilgrimage to broaden his experience, to gain understanding for himself. He was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too. He regarded himself as the fixed entity, not the pilgrimage or the mountain, and thus wasn’t ready for it. He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the mountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intensely that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness. The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

If you are faced with a mountain, you have several options.You can climb it and cross to the other side.You can go around it.You can dig under it.You can fly over it.You can blow it up.You can ignore it and pretend it’s not there.You can turn around and go back the way you came.Or you can stay on the mountain and make it your home.

~ Vera Nazarian

Transfixed by the bright gaze of a lizard, I become calm. This stone on which the lizard lies was under the sea when lizards first came into being, and now the flood is wearing it away, to return it once again into the oceans.

~ Peter Matthiessen

If you have not touched the rocky wall of a canyon. If you have not heard a rushing river pound over cobblestones. If you have not seen a native trout rise in a crystalline pool beneath a shattering riffle, or a golden eagle spread its wings and cover you in shadow. If you have not seen the tree line recede to the top of a bare crested mountain. If you have not looked into a pair of wild eyes and seen your own reflection. Please, for the good of your soul, travel west.

~ Daniel J. Rice

You have to push through every barrier to get to the mountain top.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

All mountain landscapes hold stories: the ones we read, the ones we dream, and the ones we create.-from the Editor's Note, The Alpinist (April 1, 2010)

~ George Michael Sinclair Kennedy

The mountains themselves call us into greater stories.

~ Donald Miller

Here there was no monster greater than the ragged mountains.

~ Rachel Hartman

You were contemplating the mountain, Mr. Conway? Came the inquiry.Yes, it's a fine sight. It has a name, I suppose?It is called KarakalI don't think I've ever heard of it. Is is very high?Over twenty-eight thousand feet.Indeed? I didn't realize there would be anything on that scale outside the Himalayas. Has it been properly surveyed? Whose are the measurements?Whose would you expect, my dear sir? Is there anything incompatible between monasticism and trigonometry?

~ James Hilton

I had this dream about you. We went hunting up in the mountains and I caught a unicorn. You told me now I know how it feels to be you.

~ Crystal Woods

There is wisdom in climbing mountains... For they teach us how truly small we are.

~ Jeff Wheeler

All mountain people are like that. No matter where you go, the mountains call you back.

~ Karan Bajaj

I have woken up…quite sloshedfrom night-mingled rainsa little drugged, by mountain fogsI have been kidnappedfor years....by a mere kiss.

~ Sanober Khan

The moon rested right above the mountains, a place I call home.

~ Daniel Wallock

Gazing out from the mountains, the clouds are whiter, the sky is bluer, the air seeping into your lungs is as clear as the water roaring down from the snow, melting on the high peaks. A place where heaven is a little closer.

~ Virginia Alison

I walked slowly to enjoy this freedom, and when I came out of the mountains, I saw the sky over the prairie, and I thought that if heaven was real, I hoped it was a place I never had to go, for this earth was greater than any paradise.

~ Daniel J. Rice

There is always a mountain ahead, that must be conquered.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita