Reinhold Messner Quotes

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Reinhold Messner

Profession : Explorer

Birth : September 17, 1944

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

Reinhold Messner

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

Reinhold Messner

I produce schnapps on my farm but I'm not fond of drinking it.

Reinhold Messner

I'm a rock climber, a high-altitude climber, an adventurer, a storyteller through my museums, and a writer of more than 50 books.

Reinhold Messner

Around half of the top alpinists have died climbing. Of course if I'm careful and turn back more often than the others, I can increase my chances of survival. But if I hadn't been lucky a few times, I wouldn't be here.

Reinhold Messner

In mountaineering, there is not only the activity, but the philosophy behind it. Some say a moral, but I am against that because all morality is dangerous.

Reinhold Messner

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

Reinhold Messner

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

Reinhold Messner

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.

Reinhold Messner

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

Reinhold Messner

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

Reinhold Messner

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

Reinhold Messner

I was always at my best when I was learning, when I was curious. When I had yet to see past the next horizon.

Reinhold Messner

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.

Reinhold Messner

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.

Reinhold Messner

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

Reinhold Messner

Mountaineering is over. Alpinism is dead. Maybe its spirit is still alive a little in Britain and America, but it will soon die out.

Reinhold Messner

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.

Reinhold Messner

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

Reinhold Messner

For me the Everest solo was the icing on the cake of my climbs: the highest mountain in the world, during a monsoon, and as far as possible even on a new route, of course without oxygen.

Reinhold Messner