When I was 23, I climbed this mountain in Alaska called Devil's Thumb alone. It was incredibly dangerous, and I did it because I thought that if I did something that hard and pulled it off, my life was gonna be transformed. And of course, nothing happened. But I get the search for purpose.

Jon Krakauer

Whenever I see a tree that is climbable, it must be climbed. Sometimes when I'm on a run, I'll just run up a tree, jump on a branch and swing off. My favorite tree, in Saratoga, gets me a good 75 feet up.

Aaron Patzer

Time Good Wing

It's because I have no sense of shame that I'm always willing to give things a go: I've ridden horses naked into the sea, I've climbed rocks, all kinds of things.

Abbey Lee Kershaw

Willing Will Ways

While the developed world has shifted from agriculture to manufacturing and then to services, the number of jobs has always climbed.

Alain Dehaze

World While Ways

I did climb about 80 buildings around the world and I climbed even the five tallest.

Alain Robert

World UN Tall

When I was 12, I forgot the keys to my parent's apartment. So I simply climbed up seven floors to get in.

Alain Robert

Men Art Up

If you've climbed the first 140 meters it doesn't mean that you've succeeded; you are going to succeed by climbing the last 10 meters.

Alain Robert

You T Succeeded

I've done routes where I've climbed 200 feet off the ground and just been, like, 'What am I doing?' I then just climbed back down and went home. Discretion is the better part of valor. Some days are just not your day. That's the big thing with free soloing: when to call it.

Alex Honnold

Home Art Your

I have a journal of everything I've ever climbed since 2005. For the entry about free soloing Half Dome, I put a frowny face and added some little notes about what I should have done better, and then underlined it. Turns out that is one of my biggest climbing achievements.

Alex Honnold

Men Very UN

I've definitely got lists of things I'd love to accomplish as a climber. But let's face it: The world's full of climbers, and the realm of unexplored, unclimbed peaks is shrinking rapidly.

Alex Lowe

Love World Unexplored

When I first climbed into a go-kart, aged 13, I thought to myself: 'This is what I want to do with my life, and I want to drive F1.'

Alex Zanardi

Life Art Age

It is wrong when we, in effect, throw safe and sound financial institutions into the same category with banks and lenders that climbed too far out on a limb with no way to return.

Amy Klobuchar

Wrong Wit Way

When I was a kid growing up, we had a cherry tree in the backyard, 100 years old. I climbed it, and it gave shade in the summertime and excellent cherries in the late summer. Having cherry blossoms around gives the best springtime vibe ever.

Andrew Wyatt

Time Years Year

The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.

Ayn Rand

Success Unity Unit

Before my mother was a King, she climbed trees and wrestled with boys. And won. Even as a child, Coretta Scott demonstrated that her gender would not deter her success, nor did it detract from her strength.

Bernice King

Success Strength Wrestle

One day we were sitting in our little classroom in the middle of Australia Zoo, and Dad bursts in and says, 'OK, today we're going to go climb a mountain,' - the Glass House Mountains are about 20 minutes away - so we packed up all our math work and ran out the door and climbed Mount Tibrogargan.

Bindi Irwin

Work Zoo Were

As we reflect back upon the tragic loss of Challenger and her brave crew of heroes who were aboard that fateful day, I am reminded that they truly represented the best of us, as they climbed aloft on a plume of propellant gasses, reaching for the stars, to inspire us who were Earthbound.

Buzz Aldrin

Art Who Were

I started as a writer for magazines, and soon they asked me to illustrate my stories. I started from the bottom of the bottom. And I climbed the stairs, one by one.

Carine Roitfeld

Art Writer Write

'To Kill a Mockingbird' appeared to highly favorable reviews and quickly climbed to the top of bestseller lists, where it remained for more than eighty weeks. In 1961, the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. A film adaptation was released in 1962, starring Gregory Peck, and received three Academy Awards.

Charles J. Shields

War Where Weeks

In Canada, I climbed some mountains with the Alpine Club of Canada, which taught me a lot about stamina.

Chris Carter

Wit Which UN

I have run with the bulls in Pamplona. I have raced with Mario Andretti in Indianapolis. I have climbed the Great Wall of China. I have jumped out of airplanes over Kansas.

Craig Sager

Great Wit Wall

When I was 11 years old, my parents wanted me to do something besides get in trouble. So they enrolled me in sailing classes at the Sea Shell Association in Santa Barbara, Calif. From the moment I climbed into that 8-foot dinghy in 1952, I knew instinctively what to do and sensed I had done it before.

David Crosby

While on top of Everest, I looked across the valley towards the great peak Makalu and mentally worked out a route about how it could be climbed. It showed me that even though I was standing on top of the world, it wasn't the end of everything. I was still looking beyond to other interesting challenges.

Edmund Hillary

No one remembers who climbed Mount Everest the second time.

Edmund Hillary

Once I climbed into a mountain lion's cage and she bounded at me and put her paw on my face, but she kept her claws withdrawn.

Edward Hoagland

Each era has the fatal hubris to believe that it has once and for all climbed to the top of the mountain and can see everything as it is, from the highest and most objective vantage point possible.

Eric Metaxas

Percussion is physical, as most instruments are. The body must function well in order to play the instruments well. Last year I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.

Evelyn Glennie

As a little kid, I climbed a lot of trees because I always loved the bird's-eye view.

Felix Baumgartner

Steven Adler and I played football in the street when we were 12. I remember rehearsing in my bedroom with my first band, and some kid climbed over the fence of my backyard and peeked his head in the window to see who was rocking. It was Slash.

Flea

I began taking pictures in the natural world to be able to show people what I was experiencing when I climbed and explored in Yosemite in the High Sierra.

Galen Rowell

I climbed Mount Everest. I don't quit.

Gary Johnson

I was on a picture for four or five days, had an opportunity to be on a set, and the assistant cameraman kept showing me things. One day I climbed the fence, knowing they needed an assistant cameraman. A couple of days later, I was one. The first day or two, it was pretty disastrous, but I knew something about photography, and I caught on quick.

George Stevens

We've climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it's a valley of peace.

George W. Bush

After much prayerful consideration, I feel that I must say I have climbed my last political mountain.

George Wallace

My family moved to Aspen, Colorado, where we had 'Avalanche Danger' days that kept us from going to school, climbed 14,000-foot peaks as part of my education, and I learned to snowboard.

Gretchen Bleiler

It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.

Herbert Hoover

So I go to my first book signing, and these two girls came up and gave me a piece of paper: '10 reasons you should date our dad. He climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. He's a lawyer.' He didn't know what was going on. He didn't even know me. They called him, and he came down and asked me out that day. Now I'm dating their dad!

Hoda Kotb

In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool-wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis - man, the inventor of the city - we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages.

Howard Bloom

When I needed to think or was really upset, generally I climbed a tree.

Ian Frazier

It's about a young man who has climbed to fame and he discovers that his writing and the relationship with his wife are really more important for him than anything else.

Ismail Merchant

As I climbed the electoral ladder - from state assemblyman to mayor of Woodbridge and finally to governor of New Jersey - political compromises came easy to me because I'd learned how to keep a part of myself innocent of them.

James McGreevey

When I was 10 years old, I loved - I loved books, and I used to haunt the secondhand bookshop. And I found a little book I could just afford, and I bought it, and I took it home. And I climbed up my favorite tree, and I read that book from cover to cover. And that was Tarzan of the Apes. I immediately fell in love with Tarzan.

Jane Goodall

In 1972, I climbed out of my bedroom window and ran away from home with my older sister and her friends to go to the infamous Sunbury rock festival.

Jimmy Barnes

There's intense personal gratification in finding a mountain and becoming inspired by the aesthetics of an unclimbed line on that mountain, especially if that line has been tried by a lot of people who couldn't do it, and you get to set yourself up against the history of it.

Jimmy Chin

You can show up at Everest having never really climbed before, because it's like hiking, basically. You can't show up on Meru and start up the thing unless you have years and years of experience. Climbing and spending time on the mountains is really the only way you can train.

Jimmy Chin

Man has climbed up from some lower animal form, but he has, as it were, pulled the ladder up after him.

John Burroughs

Of all the mountain ranges I have climbed, I like the Sierra Nevada the best.

John Muir

The director sent for me for Tarzan. I climbed the tree and walked out on a limb. The next day I was told I was an actor.

Johnny Weissmuller

When I was 23, I climbed this mountain in Alaska called Devil's Thumb alone. It was incredibly dangerous, and I did it because I thought that if I did something that hard and pulled it off, my life was gonna be transformed. And of course, nothing happened. But I get the search for purpose.

Jon Krakauer

Climbing Mount Everest was the biggest mistake I've ever made in my life. I wish I'd never gone. I suffered for years of PTSD and still suffer from what happened. I'm glad I wrote a book about it. But, you know, if I could go back and relive my life, I would never have climbed Everest.

Jon Krakauer

When I was 23, I went to Alaska by myself into the glaciers of the coast range and climbed a mountain by myself. It was incredibly reckless, incredibly stupid. But I was lucky. And I survived, and I came back to tell my story.

Jon Krakauer