Alex Lowe Quotes

Stand at the base and look up at 3,000 feet of blankness. It just looks like there's no way you can climb it. That's what you seek as a climber. You want to find something that looks absurd and figure out how to do it.

Golf without bunkers and hazards would be tame and monotonous. So would life.

The way to Everest is not a Yellow Brick Road.

I find that each job that I do, the thing that gets me there is when I'm not smarter than it, when I don't know instantly how that thing is made. Because if I do, then it's boring. Or it would be simple.

Young man, it would be as difficult to tell all about it, all that may occur or be needed on such a journey, as for a carpenter to tell every blow he had got to strike on commencing to erect a house.

I happily claim expertise in no single aspect of climbing, which is what has kept the passion burning hot all these years.

Today, to find a challenge is really hard. In the Alps, everything is done. The new lines, almost all of them are finished. So to find a new challenge, it's all beginning to go to speed.

The harder routes you climb, the more interesting the climbing gets and the more crazy moves you are forced to figure out.

I've always been quite careful about what I wanted to do. I've just never wanted to revisit old ground or do something that's easy. I want to do something that I would look at and go, "I don't know what to do!" The most exciting thing is when you're a bit scared, so I'm looking to find something that's really terrifying.

I saw a mountain. I wanted to climb it.

Climbing is unadulterated hard labor. The only real pleasure is the satisfaction of going where no man has been before and where few can follow.

Searching is half the fun: life is much more manageable when thought of as a scavenger hunt as opposed to a surprise party.

And for me, the real world involves everything: risk, danger, beauty, energy, all we meet with in the real world.

While on top of Everest, I looked across the valley towards the great peak Makalu and mentally worked out a route about how it could be climbed. It showed me that even though I was standing on top of the world, it wasn't the end of everything. I was still looking beyond to other interesting challenges.

I climb mountains.

Mountaineering is one of the most difficult sports - we are away from routine life for days, living in tents, and it requires high degree of physical and mental strength.

I'm attracted to playing things that I find difficult, just because it's a journey that is much more interesting.

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.

My Antarctic expedition is just about doable, just feasible and that's what is exciting to me. If I knew it was possible, if I knew I could do it without too much bother, I wouldn't be interested.

This life is like a swimming pool. You dive into the water, but you can't see how deep it is.

The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this; What is the use of climbing Mount Everest? and my answer must at once be, it is no use. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever.

I enjoyed climbing with other people, good friends, but I did quite a lot of solo climbing, too.

Anytime you finish a climb, there's always the next thing you can try.

We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls ride over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may conjecture many things.

If I know I make this much trouble, I never climb Everest.