Reinhold Messner Quotes

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Reinhold Messner

Profession : Explorer

Birth : September 17, 1944

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.

Reinhold Messner

There are three elements of mountaineering - difficulty, danger, and exposure. Difficulty is the technical aspect of it. Danger, it is best to avoid, but some people like to increase danger to a point where their success is dependent only on luck. And exposure, which is what truly defines Alpinism, is what you face in wild nature.

Reinhold Messner

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

Reinhold Messner

Life is about daring to carry out your ideas. And for me, it always comes back to the wilderness, nature, mountains.

Reinhold Messner

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

Reinhold Messner

I have been in the most dangerous of places just in order to survive. An intelligent man would stay in a safe place to survive.

Reinhold Messner

A 30-year-old rock climber is an old man. At 40, one is in the middle of his high-altitude power. At 50, a crosser of deserts is at his best age. But at 60, each of us is out of the game.

Reinhold Messner

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

Reinhold Messner

A good expedition doesn't need a leader at all. You are deciding day by day, discussing it in a democratic way.

Reinhold Messner

The only possibility to have a knowledge of both the Earth's nature and our own internal nature is through traditional climbing when you go on your own, far from safety, and encounter the unknown.

Reinhold Messner

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.

Reinhold Messner

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.

Reinhold Messner

Climbing is more of an art than a sport. It's the aesthetics of a mountain that compels me. The line of a route, the style of ascent. It is creative.

Reinhold Messner

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

Reinhold Messner

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.

Reinhold Messner

Ueli Steck, I'm absolutely certain, had a very strong inner drive to keep pushing. He set very high standards for himself.

Reinhold Messner

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

Reinhold Messner

Every week someone rings me up wanting to open a new Messner museum, but I'm not interested.

Reinhold Messner

I was first to understand it was boring to go with heavy shoes to base camp. When we first tried Dhaulagiri, a very difficult approach at high altitude, we needed very heavy boots. So it was usual to wear such heavy boots to approach all base camps. But I thought this was crazy. We needed lighter shoes for many of the approaches.

Reinhold Messner

The Dolomites are the most beautiful rock mountains in the world, but in a few million years they will just be desert.

Reinhold Messner