Tenzing Norgay Quotes

Your path at 22 will not necessarily be your path at 32 or 42.

The aristocracy in the future is not one of wealth or university education, but the aristocracy of the men who have done something for themselves and their fellow men.

As a lower-class kid, I was raised to think success would be owning stuff. Having that great job, too. Now I find my parents' dream was wrong. You never really own anything. And you're never really finished as a person.

If there is one thing I have learned on this incredible journey we call life, it is this: the sign of a truly successful individual is humility.

I'm in a great place because I've gone full circle.

At the beginning of my career, I worked for a lot of people who nobody knew, who have come up to be people that everybody knows.

Everybody sees me now, and I'm the head coach at Clemson and this and that, but my life hasn't always been this way.

Life will go on. I suppose the aura of the Nobel is such that my life will change, but I don't think I'm going to let it change much. You understand, I'm used to a quiet life.

It's a very working-class thing, to get where you want and then not feel worthy.

There are people enough to tread upon me in my lowly state, without my doing outrage to their feelings by possessing learning. Learning ain't for me. A person like myself had better not aspire. If he is to get on in life, he must get on 'umbly, Master Copperfield!

I went to Oxford University - but I've never let that hold me back.

The further you go, the more you have to be proud of. At the same time, in order to come a long way, you have to be behind to begin with. IN the end, though maybe it's not how you reach a place that matters. Just that you get there at all.

I haven't accomplished nothing yet - I have a long way to go.

College is something you complete. Life is something you experience. So don't worry about your grade, or the results or success. Success is defined in myriad ways, and you will find it, and people will no longer be grading you, but it will come from your own internal sense of decency.

Success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it... Err in the direction of kindness.

I really consider myself very fortunate over the years to have the experiences that I had and to be able to come out on top tonight means the world. It's been a long road and it's a lot of hard.

In the mountains of truth, you never climb in vain.

I'm always thinking, 'my career is over, I have to move back to Omaha, and work on the railroad, with the rest of my family. So no, I'm never thinking I've 'arrived.' I think that's a good way to be.

Obviously, throughout my career, I've always felt like certain things come to me at the right time. When I look at the work that I've done, it's always very indicative of where I was in my life at the moment.

Do you suppose you will look the same when you are an old woman as you do now? Most folk have three faces—the face they get when they’re children, the face they own when they’re grown, and the face they’ve earned when they’re old. But when you live as long as I have, you get many more. I look nothing like I did when I was a wee thing of thirteen. You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning.

If you look back on your life and where you started from it's like looking back down a mountain back to the desert floor. It's like now I can't believe I had whatever it takes or perceived whatever it took to get here.

It takes a long time to fully become who you are.

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now.

Life. Unfair and painful at times. But always moving forward, always shifting,changing, with times relentless passage smoothing down jagged parts until it no longer hurts quite so much to breathe.

The success of a close friend is often wounding, especially if he has been poor for so long.