If you have a high-way on ...

If you have a high-way on Everest, you don't meet the mountain. If everything is prepared, and you have a guide who is responsible for your security, you cannot meet the mountain. Meeting mountains is only possible if you . . . are out there in self-sufficiency.
 Reinhold Messner

Quotes from the same author

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.
 Reinhold Messner
Mountains are not fair or unfair, they are just dangerous.
 Reinhold Messner
I want to solve a climbing problem in the mountains, not in the sporting goods store.
 Reinhold Messner
...seen from above, landscapes are made up of mountains and watercourses. Just as a transparent model of the human body consists of a framework of bone and a network of arteries, the earth's crust is structured in mountain ridges, river, creeks, and gullies.
 Reinhold Messner
I was in continual agony; I have never in my life been so tired as on the summit of Everest that day. I just sat and sat there, oblivious to everything.
 Reinhold Messner