quotations about mountains
A proud heart and a lofty mountain are never fruitful.
WILLIAM GURNALL
The Christian in Complete Armour
'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue.
THOMAS CAMPBELL
Pleasures of Hope
You can see every tree and shadow on the low ones, and the high mountains are like great giant ghosts of white, sentries of the sky.
NANCY AXINN
From the Foothills of the Himalayas
What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees,
Up, up it goes,
And yet never grows?
J. R. R. TOLKIEN
Answer: A Mountain, The Hobbit
We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.
LI BAI
Banished Immortal
The mountains are mighty patient, Buddha-man.
JACK KEROUAC
The Dharma Bums
Alps on Alps in clusters swelling,
Mighty, and pure, and fit to make
The ramparts of a Godhead's dwelling!
THOMAS MOORE
Rhymes on the Road
But for us, the mountains are a sign of our dignity, a castle of honor where fighters for freedom can find refuge, like children in a mother's care.
YASSIN AREF
Son of Mountains
Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.
JOHN RUSKIN
Modern Painters
It's not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.
EDMUND HILLARY
O Magazine, Apr. 2007
After looking at the Alps, I felt that my mind had been stretched beyond the limits of its elasticity, and fitted so loosely on my old ideas of space that I had to spread these to fit it.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
I'm a person of the mountains and the open paddocks and the big empty sky, that's me, and I knew if I spent too long away from all that I'd die; I don't know what of, I just knew I'd die.
JOHN MARSDEN
A Killing Frost
Mountains are nature's testimonials of anguish; they are the sharp cry of a groaning and travailing creation.
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands
What are men to rocks and mountains?
JANE AUSTEN
Pride and Prejudice
The mountaineer excels in size the inhabitants of the plain.
RICHARD TAYLOR
Te Ika a Maui: Or, New Zealand and Its Inhabitants
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni"
At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction -- so easy to lapse into -- that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes.
ROBERT MACFARLANE
Mountains of the Mind
Most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships. Some travel into the mountains accompanied by experienced guides who know the best and least dangerous routes by which they arrive at their destination. Still others, inexperienced and untrusting, attempt to make their own routes. Few of these are successful, but occasionally some, by sheer will and luck and grace, do make it. Once there they become more aware than any of the others that there's no single or fixed number of routes. There are as many routes as there are individual souls.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning," they are meaning.
PETER MATTHIESSEN
The Snow Leopard
A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity -- culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth.
REBECCA SOLNIT
Wanderlust: A History of Walking