26 Quotes by George Leigh Mallory

Why do we travel to remote locations? To prove our adventurous spirit or to tell stories about incredible things? We do it to be alone amongst friends and to find ourselves in a land without man.

Just to lie here in the sun with great white peaks all around me and the biggest glacier in Europe at my feet, to eat from time to time, to sleep a little and dream a great deal- it is a heavenly existence.

So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.

The greatest danger in life is not to take the adventure.

Why climb Mount Everest? Because it’s there.

We don’t live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means, and that is what life is for.

The highest of the world’s mountains, it seems, has to make but a single gesture of magnificence to be the lord of all, vast in unchallenged and isolated supremacy.

Half the charm of climbing mountains is born in visions preceding this experience – visions of what is mysterious, remote, inaccessible.