Edmund Hillary Quotes

"It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves."

"People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things."

"Adventuring can be for the ordinary person with ordinary qualities, such as I regard myself."

"Good planning is important. I've also regarded a sense of humor as one of the most important things on a big expedition. When you're in a difficult or dangerous situation, or when you're depressed about the chances of success, someone who can make you laugh eases the tension."

"Life's a bit like mountaineering - never look down."

"The truth is, I'm just a rough old New Zealander who has enjoyed many challenges in his life."

"Despite all I have seen and experienced, I still get the same simple thrill out of glimpsing a tiny patch of snow in a high mountain gully and feel the same urge to climb towards it."

"When I was 50 years old, I actually decided to draw up a list of half a dozen things that I really hadn't done very well, and I was going to make efforts to improve. One of them was skiing, and I really did become a very much better skier."

"Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it."

"There is something about building up a comradeship - that I still believe is the greatest of all feats - and sharing in the dangers with your company of peers. It's the intense effort, the giving of everything you've got. It's really a very pleasant sensation."

"Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain."

"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."

"I can remember when I first went into the Himalayan area way back in 1951. Money, for instance, was not important at all to the local people. But now, finance has become just as important to them as it is to us, and this is a change maybe not for the better."

"My mother was a schoolteacher and very keen that I go to a city school, so although it was fairly impoverished times, I traveled every day to the Auckland Grammar School."

"I like to think of Everest as a great mountaineering challenge, and when you've got people just streaming up the mountain - well, many of them are just climbing it to get their name in the paper, really."

"I have never regarded myself as a hero, but Tenzing undoubtedly was."

"No one remembers who climbed Mount Everest the second time."

"On the summit of Everest, I had a feeling of great satisfaction to be first there."

"I don't spend a lot of time thinking about dying, but I like to think that I've - if it did occur - that I would die peacefully and not make too much of a fuss about it."

"Ever since the morning of May 29, 1953, when Tenzing Norgay and I became the first climbers to step onto the summit of Mount Everest, I've been called a great adventurer."

"I don't regard myself as a cracking good climber. I'm just strong in the back. I have a lot of enthusiasm, and I'm good on ice."

"I think it all comes down to motivation. If you really want to do something, you will work hard for it."

"I think the really good mountaineer is the man with the technical ability of the professional and with the enthusiasm and freshness of approach of the amateur."

"I hate being called an 'icon.' I just don't like it. That's all there is to it."

"When you go to the mountains, you see them and you admire them. In a sense, they give you a challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them."

"Take advantage of the years of pioneering efforts. You might find this boring, as the young want to rush head on, as it were."

"Tourism is a very big economic benefit to the Sherpa people, and also, they have very strong ties to their own social attitudes and their own religion, so fortunately, they're not too influenced by many of our Western attitudes."

"There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a Yeti."

"I was definitely very much a country boy."

"When you're climbing at high altitudes, life can get pretty miserable."