Wojciech Kurtyka quotes:

Whenever a climber leaves the known paths, he enters an area without rules or routines... The only advice comes from deep inside the self.

Enslavement to your own weakness - be it an addiction to alcohol, or to a woman or to fame - it's degrading, and it means losing your dignity and your freedom.

Stupidity is falling pray to your own illusions.

Every type of evil we've got in us is the result of that one true illness of the human mind - that is, of being self-centered.

Beauty is the door to another world...

Classic mountaineering grows out of a traditional romantic imagination. Its heart is the feeling, its path is blood, sweat and tears, and its restriction is God.

Every move is a creation, Maintaining the delicate balance is a creation, The line is a creation, Survival is a creation, Freedom is a creation.

If there is such a thing as spiritual materialism, it is displayed in the urge to possess the mountains rather than to unravel and accept their mysteries.

Other extremely alluring traits in people are simplicity and naturalness. Simplicity and naturalness are never painfully obvious qualities, and yet which I come across them in a person, I get this sense of a firm foundation and of a direct access to truth.

The man coming back from the hard mountain trip is a wiser being, calmer and radiating inside. I'd say momentary liberated.

I just have a dream mountain under the eyelids, this is my breath, my life.

Difficult struggle in mountaineering is our rise above himself, is the voice of freedom.

Great effort, fear and suffering sweet all the worthless chaff out of us.

I don't like egocentricity, which is something that I have arduously battled in myself my entire life.

I like to describe Himalayan climbing as a kind of art of suffering. Just pushing, pushing yourself to your limits.

I see one single suitable role for my life's work: for it to be a gift to others.

In this way the climber faces his second deadly threat. The first is naturally the risk of killing the. Second is immersed in the deceitfulness of mental and believing that you are worth as much as the public image.

Isn't a person who can live on nothing much stronger? I try to nurture that transformation in myself.

Mountaineering is a complex and unique way of life, interweaving elements of sport, art and mysticism. Success or failure depends on the ebb and flow of immense inspiration. Detecting a single rule governing this energy is difficult - it arises and vanishes like the urge to dance and remains as mysterious as the phenomenon of life itself.

Naturally, the top does not automatically make us better. Like the samurai frequented ordinary cutthroat, so sometimes extreme mountaineer can be self-centered, mythomaniac or crook to each yourself and the environment.

The most significant dimension of freedom is the freedom from one's own ego - in other words, from the feeling that I am the center of everything

The mountains are exceptional places for, as the natural environment is concerned, they are the concentration of the wildest possible variety of all natural phenomena and forms. They are somehow a concentration of the truth of nature or even I'd say its essence.

When you are totally defeated you begin again to enjoy the small things around you. Just going to the mountains, not for victory or glory, but to enjoy nature or enjoy fine people. If you always succeed you enjoy the admiration of many people. Being defeated means being limited to the basis existential choices of life. If you can enjoy the quiet evening hours it is beautiful; a hero who always succeeds may not have time to enjoy such things.