“If you think you’re a good alpinist then you’ve got to climb hard routes on hard mountains. Unless it’s really hard why would you fucking bother?” – Athol Whimp

“Scramble to reach higher ground
Soon the water will come
And claim what is mine
I must leave it behind
And climb to a new place now” – Maynard James Keenan

“Art was not motivational speaking. Art was not sentimental. It had no responsibility to be hopeful or optimistic or make anyone feel better about the world. It must reflect the world in all its brutality and beauty, not in hopes of changing it but in the mean and selfish desire to not be enrolled in its lie, to not be coopted by the television dreams, to not ignore the great crimes all around us” – Ta-Nehisi Coates

“The gentry use the pen; we the gun; they are the lords of the land, we of the mountain” – An old brigand from Roccamandolfi

“La contrainte. C’est qui te fait vivre. Si c’est confortable… tu passe à côté toute ce destiné qui était destinée à toi” – Nico Favresse

“As with a man making a second marriage, hope triumphed over experience” – HW Tilman

“Truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder – the Man knows, and can look on without a wink” – Joseph Conrad

“We hawk the anomalous, peddle the strange. Merchants of astonishment” – Clifford Geertz

“I know nothing except the fact of my own ignorance” – Diogenes

“Keep your alms, just spare me from your dogs” – Pashto proverb

“No fate, no cosmic catastrophe can deprive us; nothing can alter the fact if for one moment in eternity we have really lived.” – Eric Shipton

“Thalassa! Thalassa!” – Xenephon’s 10,000

“We knew that the time had come for us to be brave, so that we might continue to believe that we were, even if we should face the worst” – Andrew Exum

“The dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” – TE Lawrence

“It is the shift from deadliness to normal family life that is the strangest” – Ernest Hemingway

“What means all this?” – Marcus Aurelius

“All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strown
In myriad bits; while each believes his little bit the whole to own.” – Richard F. Burton

عاشر القوم أربعين يوماً. فإما صرت منهم وإما رحلت عنهم – Arabic Proverb