No, not conquer, that is too foolish a world. Any man who scales a mountain is still but a man, a transient speck compared to the immensity and permanence of a mountain .

As de Saussure said, risk-taking brings with it its own reward: it keeps a "continual agitation alive" in the heart. Hope, fear. Hope, fear - this is the fundamental rhythm of mountaineering. Life, it frequently seems in the mountains, is more intensely lived the closer one gets to its extinction: we never feel so alive as when we have nearly died.

On a world built to ordered specification, there was no logical reason for such a mountain to exist. Yet every world should have at least one unclimbable mountain.

I'm not good at being static. I have to be climbing a mountain.

I was born to live, in pursuit of the penultimate high.
I am guaranteed a Homeric death, when it's my time to die.

Looking out of a tent door into a world of snow and vanishing hopes. ~George Mallory