181 Quotes by Reinhold Messner

The wonderful things in life are the things you do, not the things you have.

I don't think psychoanalysis is nonsense necessarily; I just don't see the point of it. An analyst can find out where the problem lie, but a witch from the jungle can do that as well. If I'm not allowed to live my own life, no psychologist is ever going to be able to help me. The real problem is that most people don't live their lives, they just get by somehow.

By going to places where I do not belong, I experience the art of living - orientation through disorientation. All the deserts of the world lie within us, after all.

I want to be liked for what I do, not for what I pretend to be. I try - maybe too forcefully at times - to have the courage of my convictions and to stand my ground when necessary.

I never set out to make myself unpopular; I just say what I think, so I sometimes rub people up the wrong way, particularly people who parade their ideals before them like a banner and use them to hide behind.And I will keep on saying what I think. I am not prepared to abandon my self-determined existence for an ideology or an ideal.

I'm not going to pretend to be something I'm not - to smile sweetly all the time - just to get recognition and love. I won't play the whore for anyone, least of all for journalists. I can't do that. I want to be loved, yes, but the way I am and not the way people would like me to be. I have to be allowed to be myself.

I could tell that he had heard about me and that I would soon be a figure in the stories he would tell his grandchildren. A strange figure: "The man who kept asking everyone about the yeti, and who himself looked like one."I did not want to know that tale, but I knew that it meant that the tale of the yeti - in some form - would exist forever.Storytellers die; their stories live on.

I've always gone on the stage and told my stories. I am adventurer and a bard; I come home and I tell my story. Above all, I am a self-made man.

There's much more behind our thirst for monsters than curiosity or escapism. There is fear that the earth is loosing the last regions where myth can flourish.