An account of an expedition is not a novel. Therefore an authentic account can never be given, let alone written down by someone who was not present.

The cliches that circulate in the German media about Joachim Sauer are a total fallacy. The fact is that he's his own man. He's witty, he's profound, he can be incredibly funny, and he's an extremely bright guy.

In mountaineering, there is not only the activity, but the philosophy behind it. Some say a moral, but I am against that because all morality is dangerous.

I am a South Tyrolean. I identify with this land.

Mountains are not fair or unfair - they are dangerous.

All nationalism is dangerous; all religions are dangerous.

I have a very different fear if I'm all alone in the summit area of Mount Everest and if I know that there is nothing below me, no Sherpa, no tent, no rope.

The best climbers no longer go to the 8000ers, but to the most difficult mountains in the world which are 6000 or 7000-meter-peaks. There they find any kind of playground. But it is a pity that the really good climbers have fewer opportunities to finance their expeditions because so much attention is taken away by the Everest tourists.

Crossing the Gobi was a real milestone for me.

At 30 I was not quiet enough inside myself. At 40 I was not rich enough. At 50 I was still hoping to change the world.

All the Yeti footprints are all the same bear. The Yeti isn't a fantastic figure. The Yeti is reality.

People don't like reality, they like crazy stories.

The art of climbing is to go where you go knowing that you could die, but you don't die. That is adventure.

The Slovenians are the very best climbers in the world.

When I held in my hands the remains of Gunther, I had a strong feeling, like a phantom pain of an amputee.

I am not an anarchist, but I am anarchistical.

Gunther and I always shared the work. Each of us carried his own sleeping bag and tent, and porters carried the rest, until the highest camp, when we were on our own. Nobody helped us up there.

On your own, relying on yourself, you will never feel you are stronger than the mountain, and your respect for the peak grows.

I am not so proud to climb all the 8,000-meter peaks, but I was proud to climb Nanga Parbat solo. That was the most elegant thing I did.

Life is about daring to carry out your ideas. And for me, it always comes back to the wilderness, nature, mountains.

A tourist follows a trail; a mountaineer finds one.

A good expedition doesn't need a leader at all. You are deciding day by day, discussing it in a democratic way.

Once you lose your credibility, you can never restore it.

I am not made for lonely expeditions. In the sixties, I climbed during the day so I wouldn't have to be alone. I finally learned to stay up for weeks in the high altitude all by my own without being afraid.

I can't tell people to love mountains. They have to find their own way.

The true alpinist doesn't want any infrastructure, he wants to go into the wild. And the odds of getting killed there are relatively high. And most people are sensible enough not to want that.

By climbing mountains we were not learning how big we were. We were finding out how breakable, how weak and how full of fear we are.

I have been in the most dangerous of places just in order to survive. An intelligent man would stay in a safe place to survive.

Climbing is all about freedom, the freedom to go beyond all the rules and take a chance, to experience something new, to gain insight into human nature.

I am my own home, and my handkerchief is my flag.

I like Nietzsche. I quote him in many of my books. He was born 100 years before me.

I was first to understand it was boring to go with heavy shoes to base camp. When we first tried Dhaulagiri, a very difficult approach at high altitude, we needed very heavy boots. So it was usual to wear such heavy boots to approach all base camps. But I thought this was crazy. We needed lighter shoes for many of the approaches.

This is one of my definitions of mountaineering: to go where others do not.

I left many different mountains but always the gods gave me a chance to go back. I was always going with a quiet foot.

I had no ghost writers for the books - I wrote every line myself.

Out of all the climbers of this generation, I was the one who became known to the larger public. Many of them - not all of them, but many of them - understood they had only one chance to use me for their personal gain. And it's very easy to use me.

Each mountain in the Dolomites is like a piece of art.

My father blamed me for my brother Gunther's death, for not bringing him home. He died in an avalanche as we descended from the summit of Nanga Parbat, one of the 14 peaks over 8,000m, in 1970. Gunther and I did so much together. It was difficult for my father to understand what it was like up there.

I go to the wild mountains where I am responsible for myself. Step by step I am making sure that I don't die.

William Blake said 200 years ago that when man and mountains meet, something big is happening. I'm searching for the 'big.'

I go to the mountains for an adventure and each time I pray I will get up and down again.

Traditional alpinism is to go where the others are not going and to be self-reliant.

I learned a lot from more experienced mountaineers, such as Peter Habeler, but by the time I was about 21 I reckoned I had learned all that I needed to make me technically self-sufficient anywhere.

I want to look into the dark spaces in people's souls. At what happens to us when we go to the mountains.

On Mount Everest it feels as if you are in the womb, but on K2 you are always out on the edge.

Every week someone rings me up wanting to open a new Messner museum, but I'm not interested.

Ninety per cent of the tourists climbing big mountains are on 10 mountains - and one million mountains in the world are empty.

Adventure has to do with private, personal experiences. But, the possibilities, there are millions of unclimbed mountains - I have seen in the Eastern part of Tibet, mountains 6,000-6,500 meters high, vertical walls twice as tall as the Eiger... but nobody is going there, because they aren't 8,000-meter peaks.

Climbing is more of an art than a sport. It's the aesthetics of a mountain that compels me. The line of a route, the style of ascent. It is creative.

The only possibility to have a knowledge of both the Earth's nature and our own internal nature is through traditional climbing when you go on your own, far from safety, and encounter the unknown.