Top 50 Reinhold Messner Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.’

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.

The cliches that circulate in the German media about Joachim Sauer are a total fallacy. The fact is that he’s his own man. He’s witty, he’s profound, he can be incredibly funny, and he’s an extremely bright guy.

I was the first man to climb the world’s 14 tallest peaks without supplementary oxygen, but I never asked how high I would go, just how I would do it.

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.

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

I am responsible for my brother’s death. I feel the guilt of having survived. People say, ‘You should be happy. You survived.’ But I have this feeling that it is not right that I am alive.

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

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

I am a South Tyrolean. I identify with this land.

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

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

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

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.

I have always said that a mountain without danger is not a mountain.

I want to look into the dark spaces in people’s souls. At what happens to us when we go to the mountains.

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

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.

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

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

Climbing has so much more culture than all other activities put together. There is no culture in tennis, just a few names, a few dates. No big culture in soccer. But we have thousands of books, great philosophers, thinkers, painters.

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.

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.

William Blake said 200 years ago that when man and mountains meet, something big is happening. I’m searching for the ‘big.’

Crossing the Gobi was a real milestone for me.

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.

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.

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

Mountains are not fair or unfair – they are dangerous.

I am not an anarchist, but I am anarchistical.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

When I lost seven of my toes on Nanga Parbat and small parts of my fingertips I knew I’d never be a great rock climber. So I specialized in high-altitude climbing.

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

When I was a small child, I began on small mountains. Now, as I am getting older, the small peaks are getting bigger. If I am lucky, some day I will end on a small peak.

A tourist follows a trail; a mountaineer finds one.

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

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.’