"History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below."
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Climbing quotes
Climbing
618 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Climbing quotes (page 3 of 31)
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"Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath."
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"I climb upon the highest mountains, laughing at all tragedies - whether real or imaginary."
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"Unusual travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."
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"Man or woman, you have to have the mental characteristics, the ability to concentrate, the focus, the flexibility, where women have the advantage, and strength-to-weight ratio. It does depend on the raw power."
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"I would like to be myself in life - my real self. My ego, though, is powerful and not necessarily working in my best interest all the time. Even when climbing I can't escape the clutches of my ego. The reason why I started climbing was because I could be free from myself."
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"Once we are bound together to our brothers by a common good that is outside us, then we can breathe. Experience teaches us that love is not to gaze at one another but to gaze in the same direction. There is no comradeship except through unity on the same rope, climbing towards the same peak."
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"Eating wheat, like ice climbing, mountain boarding, and bungee jumping, is an extreme sport. It is the only common food that carries its own long-term mortality rate."
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"To the sober person adventurous conduct often seems insanity."
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"Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments."
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"With climbing you can go to the most beautiful places on the planet and practice. Anywhere there is rock, you can climb."
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"Only last week I murdered a rock, injured a stone and hospitalized a brick."
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"One who can move mountains start with the little stones."
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"Our ascent, of course, does not end the possibility for new accomplishments on El Capitan. The day will probably come when this climb will be done in five days, perhaps less; and a younger generation will make a new route on the west face."
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"I have done a fair bit of meditation practice, but I think through climbing it's definitely an easier way for me to tap into that mental state of being present and in the moment, very in tune with your body. But not in an intellectual way. Just really responding to the moment, where you don't have time to think."
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"Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools."
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"In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock."
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"Although love dwells in gorgeous palaces, and sumptuous apartments, more willingly than in miserable and desolate cottages, it cannot be denied but that he sometimes causes his power to be felt in the gloomy recesses of forests, among the most bleak and rugged mountains, and in the dreary caves of a desert."
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"Life consists with Wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest trees."
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"King Henry: But what a point, my lord, your falcon made, And what a pitch she flew above the rest! To see how God in all his creatures works! Yea, man and birds are fain of climbing high. Suffolk: No marvel, an it like your majesty, My lord protectors hawks do tower so well; They know their masters loves to be aloft, And bears his thoughts above his falcon's pitch. Gloucester: My lord, 'tis but a base ignoble mind That mounts no higher than a bird can soar."
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