Peak Experiences Quotes

Sometimes when you've reached a peak experience, you look for other peak experiences... I'd always been interested in art. I was looking for other experiences outside of sports. Art was a form of expression I had always liked a great deal.

One's only failure is failing to live up to one's own possibilities.

Sport is where an entire life can be compressed into a few hours, where the emotions of a lifetime can be felt on an acre or two of ground, where a person can suffer and die and rise again on six miles of trails through a New York City park. Sport is a theater where sinner can turn saint and a common man become an uncommon hero, where the past and the future can fuse with the present. Sport is singularly able to give us peak experiences where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential.

The championship moments are always the best and the ones you remember.

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual- become clairvoyant. We reach then into reality. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. It is in the nature of all people to have these experiences; but in our time and under the conditions of our lives, it is only a rare few who are able to continue in the experience and find expression for it.

What shall we think of a well-adjusted slave?

I don't think I'm alone in this: I'm obsessed with trying to not only be happy but maintain happiness, but my definition of happiness is skewed more towards ecstasy rather than contentment.

The highest goal that man can achieve is amazement.

Because one day of something wonderful is better than a forever of nothing special.

In 1977, I climbed a fairly difficult mountain for the first time, which was Mount McKinley, in Alaska. I climbed the so-called 'American Direct Route,' which was a route straight up to the top. I really enjoyed it. Through such experiences, I learned that mountaineering wasn't just about height. I found that different routes have different charms.

Expression and communication in the peak–experiences tend often to become poetic, mythical, and rhapsodic, as if this were the natural kind of language to express such states of being.

For me, the best times are always going to be the most intense, the ones with the highest highs and the lowest lows.

Laugh at what you hold sacred, and still hold it sacred.

I suppose that each of us may have a great moment in our life, a month, a week a year, when we are most fully what we are meant to be