Life is about daring to carry out your ideas. And for me, it always comes back to the wilderness, nature, mountains.
Reinhold Messner
Climbing is all about freedom, the freedom to go beyond all the rules and take a chance, to experience something new, to gain insight into human nature.
By climbing mountains we were not learning how big we were. We were finding out how breakable, how weak and how full of fear we are.
Once you lose your credibility, you can never restore it.
A tourist follows a trail; a mountaineer finds one.
A good expedition doesn't need a leader at all. You are deciding day by day, discussing it in a democratic way.
I am not made for lonely expeditions. In the sixties, I climbed during the day so I wouldn't have to be alone. I finally learned to stay up for weeks in the high altitude all by my own without being afraid.
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.
I am my own home, and my handkerchief is my flag.
I can't tell people to love mountains. They have to find their own way.
I like Nietzsche. I quote him in many of my books. He was born 100 years before me.
I was first to understand it was boring to go with heavy shoes to base camp. When we first tried Dhaulagiri, a very difficult approach at high altitude, we needed very heavy boots. So it was usual to wear such heavy boots to approach all base camps. But I thought this was crazy. We needed lighter shoes for many of the approaches.
This is one of my definitions of mountaineering: to go where others do not.
William Blake said 200 years ago that when man and mountains meet, something big is happening. I'm searching for the 'big.'
I go to the mountains for an adventure and each time I pray I will get up and down again.
Traditional alpinism is to go where the others are not going and to be self-reliant.
I left many different mountains but always the gods gave me a chance to go back. I was always going with a quiet foot.
I had no ghost writers for the books - I wrote every line myself.
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.
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.
Each mountain in the Dolomites is like a piece of art.
I learned a lot from more experienced mountaineers, such as Peter Habeler, but by the time I was about 21 I reckoned I had learned all that I needed to make me technically self-sufficient anywhere.
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 go to the wild mountains where I am responsible for myself. Step by step I am making sure that I don't die.
I want to look into the dark spaces in people's souls. At what happens to us when we go to the mountains.
On Mount Everest it feels as if you are in the womb, but on K2 you are always out on the edge.
Every week someone rings me up wanting to open a new Messner museum, but I'm not interested.
Ninety per cent of the tourists climbing big mountains are on 10 mountains - and one million mountains in the world are empty.
Adventure has to do with private, personal experiences. But, the possibilities, there are millions of unclimbed mountains - I have seen in the Eastern part of Tibet, mountains 6,000-6,500 meters high, vertical walls twice as tall as the Eiger... but nobody is going there, because they aren't 8,000-meter peaks.
Climbing is more of an art than a sport. It's the aesthetics of a mountain that compels me. The line of a route, the style of ascent. It is creative.
The only possibility to have a knowledge of both the Earth's nature and our own internal nature is through traditional climbing when you go on your own, far from safety, and encounter the unknown.
I would never bring a flag on the summit. If somebody is climbing for a country he is not normal, he is sick.
For years I was a rock climber and nothing else. I went to school, yes, and university, yes, but in my heart I was a rock climber.
Climbing is not a competition, and you cannot talk in terms of 'greatest,' it means nothing.
The museum at Ortles is dedicated to the world of ice so we wanted visitors to feel like they were inside a glacier.
I started the whole 'Into Thin Air' thing - nothing I'm proud of.
Traditional alpinism is slowly disappearing. It is becoming sport, indoors on small walls with holds where you cannot really fall.
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.
Alpinism means you go by yourself with your own responsibility, knowing that you could die. But Everest now is more like ski tourism: preparing the piste, helping people go up, setting oxygen bottles near the summit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the West, the art of rock climbing is growing because it has to do with less risk, good muscles. But the people seeking high goals in high places are in Eastern Europe, and they reach their goals because they are willing to suffer more.
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.
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.
I think my cultural work is more important than the adventures I did. The adventures are not important for human beings. It's the conquering of the useless.
There are three elements of mountaineering - difficulty, danger, and exposure. Difficulty is the technical aspect of it. Danger, it is best to avoid, but some people like to increase danger to a point where their success is dependent only on luck. And exposure, which is what truly defines Alpinism, is what you face in wild nature.
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.
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.
