We are so clothed in rationalization and dissemblance that we can recognize but dimly the deep primal impulses that motivate us.

It is the ultimate wisdom of the mountains that a man is never more a man than when he is striving for what is beyond his grasp.

A man climbs the mountains because he needs to climb, because that is the way he is made, Rock and ice and snow and wind and the great blue canopy of the sky are not all that he finds upon the mountain-tops.

He discovers things about his own body and mind that he had almost forgotten in the day-to-day, year-to-year routine of living. He learns what his legs are for, what his lungs are for, what the wise men of old meant by refreshment of the spirit.

I am certainly convinced that it is one of the greatest impulses of mankind to arrive at something higher than the natural state

Love, like fire, cannot subsist without constant impulse; it ceases to live from the moment it ceases to hope or to fear

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness