Quotes about mountains
page 3

“I saw in her expression that old, unshakable mountain of concern. And I realized when you look at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know”

Mitch Albom For One More Day

Source: For One More Day

Love

“All mountain landscapes hold stories: the ones we read, the ones we dream, and the ones we create.
-from the Editor's Note, The Alpinist (April 1, 2010)”

George Michael Sinclair Kennedy (1926–2014) British historian

Dreams, Reading

“Before you conquer the mountain, you must learn to overcome your fear.”

Isabel Allende book City of the Beasts

Source: City of the Beasts

Fear, Learning

“One learns that the world, though made, is yet being made. That this is still the morning of creation. That mountains, long conceived, are now being born, brought to light by the glaciers, channels traced for coming rivers, basins hollowed for lakes.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

"Alaska Glaciers: Graphic Description of the Yosemite of the Far Northwest", San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin (part 5 of 11 part series "Notes of a Naturalist") dated 7 September 1879, published 27 September 1879; reprinted as "Baird Glacier" in Letters from Alaska, edited by Robert Engberg and Bruce Merrell (University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), pages 28-32 (at page 31); modified slightly and reprinted in Travels in Alaska http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/travels_in_alaska/ (1915), chapter 5, A Cruise in the Cassiar First lines of the documentary film series " The National Parks: America's Best Idea http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/" by Ken Burns. 1910s

World, Light, Learning

“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Based on a 1957 Ken Purdy quote, first mentioned in a posthumously published interview with Alfonso de Portago: note: :“I have a quotation in a story, a piece of fiction that won't be published until this summer,” I told Portago, “something that I thought at the time I wrote it you might have said: that of all sports, only bull fighting and mountain-climbing and motor-racing really tried a man, that all the rest are mere recreations. Would you have said that?” I tend to agree with Hemingway who said something to the effect that only mountain climbing, bull fighting and automobile racing were sports and that everything else was a game. Source: Ken W. Purdy (August 1957) "Portaro; The real story of the sizzling Spaniard" https://archive.org/details/sim_car-and-driver_1957-08_3/page/n70 Sports Cars Illustrated (Ziff-Davis: New York) vol. 3 no. 2 p. 63 note: :“There are three sports that try a man,” she remembered Helmut Ovden saying, “bullfighting, motor racing, mountain climbing. All the rest are recreations.” Source: Ken W. Purdy (27 July 1957) "Blood Sport" https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-evening-post_1957-07-27_230_4/page/92 The Saturday Evening Post (Curtis: Philadelphia) vol. 230 no. 4 p. 92 Source: An early attribution to Hemingway is the essay "Why" by Gene Hill, published in Guns & Ammo and reprinted in 1972 in A Hunter's Fireside Book: Tales of Dogs, Ducks, Birds and Guns (Winchester Press: New York) ISBN 0876910762 p. 96

Game, Sport

“The thing about mountains is that you have to keep on climbing them, and that it's always hard, but there's a view from top every time when you finally get there.”

Nancy Garden book Annie on My Mind

Source: Annie on My Mind

Time

“The roaring seas and many a dark range of mountains lie between us.”

Homér Iliad

Source: The Iliad

Lie, Sea

“When you loved me I gave you the whole sun and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in a single moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of your arms, and the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your soul.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Love, Soul, Star, Sun

“It was a kiss to level mountains and shake stars from the sky. It was a kiss to make angels faint and demons weep… a passionate, demanding, soul-searing kiss that nearly knocked the earth off its axis.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Tempt Me at Twilight

Angels, Soul, Star, Kiss

“It was the work of the quiet mountains, this torrent of purity at my feet.”

Jack Kerouac book The Dharma Bums

Source: The Dharma Bums

“Who wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothing”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

World

“You will find a way to live without me. You will find a way to live for both of us,' Alexander said to Tatiana as the swelling Kama River flowed from the Ural Mountains through a pine village named Lazarevo, once when they were in love, and young.”

Paullina Simons book The Bronze Horseman

Source: The Bronze Horseman

Love, Way

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

Frank Herbert book Dune

Source: Dune

“I am mountains that crush. I am waves that crash. I am storms that shatter. I am”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Hero of Ages

“Mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.”

Jon Krakauer (1954) American outdoors writer and journalist

Dreams

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

“To find a mountain path all by oneself gives a greater feeling of strength than to take a path that is shown.”

Karen Horney (1885–1952) American-German psychoanalyst

Source: Self-Analysis

Feeling

“It's wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

God, Fear

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

Preface (dated June 1987) for 1988 reprint of Desert Solitaire
Desert Solitaire (1968)
Context: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

“You ask why I make my home in the mountain forest,
and I smile, and am silent,
and even my soul remains quiet:
it lives in the other world
which no one owns.
The peach trees blossom,
The water flows.”

Li Bai (701–762) Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty poetry period

World, Smile, Home, Soul

“it wasn't the mountain ahead that wears you out, but the grain of sand in your shoe”

Karen White (1964) American writer

Source: The Beach Trees

Shoe

“Saying good night to the mountains, the sun throws his most beautiful rays to them, that they may not forget him till the morning.”

Johanna Spyri book Heidi

Source: Heidi

Beauty, Sun, Night, Forgetting

“I don’t know, I don’t feel right unless I’ve got the sea and mountains nearby. People are mostly a product of where they were born and raised. How you think and feel’s always linked to the lay of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

People, Feeling, Thinking, Sea

“The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Source: The Diamond as Big as the Ritz & Other Stories

“Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.”

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist

Source: Postscript to the Name of the Rose

Learning

“Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.”

Robert M. Pirsig (1928–2017) American writer and philosopher

People

“Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains?”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Variant: What are men to rocks and mountains?
Source: Pride and Prejudice

Men, Disappointment

“Win told me that one isn’t improved by being at the top of the mountain, one is improved by the climb.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Married By Morning

“Barring love I'll take my life in large doses alone--rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.”

Jim Harrison (1937–2016) American novelist, poet, essayist

Source: Wolf False Memoir

Love, Life, Dogs, Fish

“The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.”

W.S. Merwin (1927–2019) American poet

“Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there: prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment, in the boldest style imaginable.”

Jon Krakauer (1954) American outdoors writer and journalist

Source: Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster

Imagination

“sometimes to find truth one must move mountains -Kohler”

Dan Brown book Angels & Demons

Source: Angels & Demons

Truth

“You’re really cute, Midori,” I corrected myself.
“What do you mean really cute?”
“So cute the mountains crumble and the oceans dry up.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

“I'm a person of the mountains and the open paddocks and the big empty sky, that's me, and I knew if I spent too long away from all that I'd die; I don't know what of, I just knew I'd die.”

John Marsden (1950) author

Source: A Killing Frost

Personality

“And the Bastard grant us... in our direst need, the smallest gifts: the nail of the horseshoe, the pin of the axle, the feather at the pivot point, the pebble at the mountain's peak, the kiss in despair, the one right word. In darkness, understanding.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book Paladin of Souls

Source: Paladin of Souls (2003), p. 44

Understanding, Kiss, Despair

“Like any man, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, I've Been to the Mountaintop (1968)
Context: Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like any man, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land. And I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

Life, God, People

“Clearly, I see it.
I was just about to leave when I found her kneeling there.
A mountain range of rubble was written, designed, erected around her. She was clucthing at a book.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Books

“We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Speech before Joint Session of the Canadian Parliament, Ottawa (December 30, 1941)
The Yale Book of Quotations, ed. Fred R. Shapiro, Yale University Press (2006), p. 153 ISBN 0300107986
The Second World War (1939–1945)

Way

“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”

Donna Tartt book The Secret History

Source: The Secret History

Understanding, Dead

“And they did it with something that is basicly worthless in our society - pennies. But overseas, pennies can move mountains”

Greg Mortenson (1957) American mountaineer and humanitarian

Source: Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time

“I believe absolutely in my own free will and my own power to accomplish - and that is the belief that moves mountains.”

Jean Webster book Daddy-Long-Legs

Source: Daddy-Long-Legs

“She was a girl with a mountain to climb.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Girl

“I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.”

Brenda Ueland (1891–1985) Journalist and writer

Happiness, Feeling, Learning

“I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads.”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Source: Aleph

Soul

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Men, Money, World, Learning

“Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe.”

Robert W. Service (1874–1958) Canadian poet

Shoe

“Over every mountain, there is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley.”

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet

“I thought climbing the Devil's Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams.”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

Life, Dreams, Change

“Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

World, Silence

“People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

People, Thinking

“Leo frowned at the giant's spire. "Can't we blow it up or something?"
"Without me, you do not have the power," Hera said. "You might as well try to destroy a mountain."
"Done that once today," Jason said.”

Rick Riordan book The Lost Hero

Source: The Lost Hero

“I like geography best, he said, because your mountains & rivers know the secret. Pay no attention to boundaries.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas

Secret

“It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Life

“People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are. I mean, do you actually realize how much adult conversation is spent on this fuckin business? Facts treated like they were opinions just for the simple purpose of talking about it longer? Some people might think that's interesting, bub, but I'll tell you. It's romanticizing a goddamn rock by calling it a mountain range to me. People waste a helluva lot of time they could be putting to useful purposes. This is a game. See it and forget about it.”

Richard Ford The Sportswriter

Source: The Sportswriter (1986), p. 104

People, Stupidity, Game, Business

“Vegetarians are cool. All I eat are vegetarians--except for the occasional mountain lion steak.”

Ted Nugent (1948) American rock musician

“Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
This is not done by jostling in the street.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Great Things Are Done
1800s, Poems from Blake's Notebook (c. 1807-1809)

Men

“Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: Why I Wake Early

World, Understanding

“O Beautiful, for smoggy skies, insecticided grain

for strip-mined mountains' majesty, above the asphalt plain

America, America, man sheds his waste on thee

and hides the pines, with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Class Clown (1972)

Beauty, Sea

“All the birds have flown up and gone;
A lonely cloud floats leisurely by.
We never tire of looking at each other—
Only the mountain and I.”

Li Bai (701–762) Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty poetry period

[38] "Alone Looking at the Mountain"
Variant translations:
The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.
"Zazen on Ching-t'ing Mountain", trans. Sam Hamill
Flocks of birds fly high and vanish;
A single cloud, alone, calmly drifts on.
Never tired of looking at each other—
Only the Ching-t'ing Mountain and me.
"Sitting Alone in Ching-t'ing Mountain", trans. Irving Y. Lo

Bird

“While picking asters 'neath the Eastern fence,
My gaze upon the Southern mountain rests.”

Tao Yuanming (365–427) Chinese poet

In Selected Poems, trans. Gladys Yang (Chinese Literature Press, 1993), p. 62

“The union of these four Presidents carved on the face of the everlasting hills of South Dakota will constitute a distinctly national monument. It will be decidedly American in conception, in its magnitude, in its meaning and altogether worthy of our Country. No one can look upon it understandingly without realizing that it is a picture of hope fulfilled. Its location will be significant. Here in the heart of the continent, on the side of a mountain which probably no white man had ever beheld in the days of Washington, in territory which was acquired by the action of Jefferson, which remained an unbroken wilderness beyond the days of Lincoln, which was especially beloved by Roosevelt, the people of the future will see history and art combined to portray the spirit of patriotism. They will know that the figure of these Presidents has been placed here because by following the truth they built for eternity. The fundamental principles which they represented have been wrought into the very being of our Country. They are steadfast as these ancient hills.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Address at the Black Hills (1927)

People, Truth, Hope, Art

“What can stand against loyalty? It is the faith that moves mountains.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Source: Midwinter (1923), Ch. X

Faith, Loyalty

“Western field-work conjures up images of struggle on horseback […]—toughing it out on one canteen a day as you labor up and down mountains. The value of a site is supposedly correlated with the difficulty of getting there. This, of course, is romantic drivel. Ease of access is no measure of importance. The famous La Brea tar pits are right in downtown Los Angeles. To reach the Clarkia lake beds, you turn off the main road at Buzzard's Roost Trophy Company and drive the remaining fifty yards right up to the site.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Dinosaur in a Haystack

"Magnolias from Moscow", p. 403
Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)

Angels

“…to harness and directed peaceful energy from the viewers under the mountain through a twenty foot, five pointed Texas Star Vortex which was hung between the two massive exterior columns on the balcony into the historically tarnished Dallas Dealy Plaza and book depository hoping to honor John F. Kennedy's memory.”

Carson Grant (1950) American actor

Kaminsky, Denise, Aug 2006, "Carson Grant: Actor/Artist- A Lifetime of Art", Denise's Interviews and Media News, p. 1
Prytyskacz,Jean, "Focus on an Artist", Westside Arts Coalition Newsletter, Spring 2007, p. 5
About a walk-under suspended cellophane and plastic 3-D hologram mountain installation Harmony Mountain (100' x 100') Carson constructed inside the second floor of the old Dallas Union Train Station for the SIGGRAPH 1990 Convention, Texas

Books, Peace, Hope, Star

“But high up on the mountain
When the wind is hitting it
If you're watching very closely
The rock slips a little bit…”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

The Rock
Song lyrics, Portrait Gallery (1975)

“When you're on Earth, if you go to the top of a mountain, the stars look much brighter than they do at sea level. And because the space shuttle is above Earth's atmosphere, it's like being on a very, very high mountain. So they look brighter, but not bigger.”

Sally Ride (1951–2012) American physicist and astronaut

Scholastic interview (1998)

Star, Sea

“When people look for the road in the clouds
The cloud road disappears
The mountains are tall and steep
The streams are wide and still
Green mountains ahead and behind
White clouds to east and west
If you want to find the cloud road
Seek it within”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

People

“I will contemplate the spectacle of your sea. The viewpoints of our mountains also offer us the limitless spectacle of immensity. The unfillable void has a calming effect... The sea! The sea with its charms saddens me. In its joyful moods, it makes me think of the laughing tiger; in its sad moods it recalls the crocodile’s tears, and in its roaring fury, the caged monster that cannot swallow me up.”

Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) French painter

Quote in Courbet's letter to Victor Hugo, 28 November 1864; as cited in Chu, Letters, p. 249; quoted in 'Paysages de Mer - Courbet's The Wave', by Anthony White https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/paysages-de-mer-courbets-the-wave/ 1860s

Sadness, Mood, Thinking, Tear

“Keep close to Nature's heart … and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

statement by Muir as remembered by Samuel Hall Young in Alaska Days with John Muir (1915), chapter 7
1910s

Nature, Heart

“In the summer of 1928, Hitler aged 39, was the Nazi party leader, and he fell in love with Geli Raubal, his 20 year old niece, the daughter of his widowed half-sister, Angela Raubal. He took her everywhere, to meetings and conferences, on long walks in the mountains and to the cafés and theaters in Munich. Gossip about the party leader and his beautiful blond niece was inevitable in Munich and throughout Nazi circles in southern Germany. By 1931, some deep rift whose origins and nature have never been fully ascertained grew between them.”

William L. Shirer book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960)

Love, Age, Beauty, Nature

“I feel a sort of yearnin' 'nd a chokin' in my throat
When I think of Red Hoss Mountain 'nd of Casey's tabble dote!”

Eugene Field A Little Book of Western Verse

Casey's Table d'Hôte http://www.amherst.edu/~rjyanco94/literature/eugenefield/poems/westernandotherverse/caseystabledhote.html, st. 1 A Little Book of Western Verse (1889)

Feeling, Thinking

“Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

pages 271-284 (at pages 282-283)
1890s, The National Parks and Forest Reservations, 1895

People, Way, Tree, Heart

“What dost thou bring to me, O fair To-day,
That comest o'er the mountains with swift feet?”

Julia Caroline Dorr (1825–1913) American writer

To-Day; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922).

“And now it was your purpose to weep Vesuvius' flames in pious melody and spend your tears on the losses of your native place, what time the Father took the mountain from earth and lifted it to the stars only to plunge it down upon the hapless cities far and wide.”
Jamque et flere pio Vesuvina incendia cantu mens erat et gemitum patriis impendere damnis, cum pater exemptum terris ad sidera montem sustulit et late miseras deiecit in urbes.

Statius Silvae

iii, line 205
Silvae, Book V

Star, Tear, Loss, Time

“May the Gods, if they did not die of boredom, never give you one of those flat kingdoms to govern; may lead you through mountain paths; may they give you for a companion a good Andalusian mule with eyes like wells, a brow like an anvil, and who stops dead in his tracks because he sees the shadow his ears make on the road in front of him.”

Alain (1868–1951) French philosopher

The King is Bored
Alain On Happiness (1928)

God, Dead

“.. upon the frightening gray sky one can see a black mountain, completely black even with black houses, and all of a sudden a fire-red house appears, a violet path with snowflakes and on the path a black chain of people like crows.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

Quote from Werefkin's letter to Alexej von Jawlensky, 1910 Lithuanian Martynas-Mazvydas-National Library, Vilnius, RS (F19-1458,1.31) as reprinted in Weidle, Marianne Werefkin, Die Farbe beisst mich ans Herz, 108; as quoted in 'Identity and Reminiscence in Marianne Werefkin's Return Home', c. 1909; Adrienne Kochman http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring06/52-spring06/spring06article/171-ambiguity-of-home-identity-and-reminiscence-in-marianne-werefkins-return-home-c-1909 1906 - 1911

People, Appearance, Housing

“And he says that the mountains are fairer
For once being held in your thought;”

Bret Harte (1836–1902) American author and poet

East and West Poems, Part I, His Answer to "Her Letter.".

“To die for the racists is lighter than a feather, but to die for the people is heavier than any mountain and deeper than any sea.”

Huey P. Newton (1942–1989) Co-founder of the Black Panther Party

To Die for the People (1972), paraphrasing Mao Zedong's "Serve the People"

People, Sea

“For me snowboarding is basically like being beaten up by a mountain.”

Ed Byrne (1972) Irish comedian

Different Class (2009)

“This mountain-ash, whose flower-fill'd boughs
Spread like a cloud at noon —
Whose shade is as a haunted place
For the sweet airs of June :
'Twas but a little shrub when first
I wreathed amid thy hair
Its berries, like the coral crown
That the sea-maidens wear.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(20th November 1824) Constancy
The London Literary Gazette, 1824

Flowers, Sea

“[Concerning an aurora, "vivid crimson … indescribably rich and deep":] The white, rayless light of morning, seen when I was alone amid the peaks of the California Sierra, had always seemed to me the most telling of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. But here the mountains themselves were made divine, and declared His glory in terms still more impressive.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Travels in Alaska http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/travels_in_alaska/ (1915), chapter 9: The Discovery of Glacier Bay 1910s

God, Light

“Until last year, although this town was barely fifty miles from Denver, the road had been bad and only a handful of visitors had chanced on it. The increasing tendency for people to take mountain vacations, however, since the sea had become too filthy to be tolerable, could not be ignored. The road now was excellent and the area had exploded.”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

January “SNOW JOB”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

People, Chance, Sea

“How wonderful is Cold Mountain
Climbers are all afraid
The moon shines on clear water twinkle twinkle
Wind rustles the tall grass
Plum trees flower in the snow
Bare twisted trees have clouds for foliage
A touch of rain brings it all alive
Unless you see clearly do not approach”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Flowers, Tree, Grass, Water

“In another life — this isn’t what I know, but how I feel — these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon — the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the upper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again into the sky.”

Peter Matthiessen book The Snow Leopard

The Snow Leopard (1978)

Life, Feeling, Home, Spring

“When you live on Cold Mountain long enough the autumns pass quickly
When you live alone you have no worries
When you leave the doors open no one bothers you
The bubbling stream runs forever
In the cave a clay pot boils over a fire on the ground
A wandering breeze stirs the fragrant pines
When hungry I eat one simple meal
And lean against the rock in complete harmony”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Autumn

“[The] chief [of the gods of Cimmeria] is Crom. He dwells on a great mountain. What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die. Better to be silent than to call his attention to you; he will send you dooms, not fortune! He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man's soul. What else shall men ask of the gods? … There is no hope here or hereafter in the cult of my people. In this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in the bright madness of battle; dying, their souls enter a gray misty realm of clouds and icy winds, to wander cheerlessly throughout eternity.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"Queen of the Black Coast" (1934)

Men, God, People, Pleasure

““With a few movements of the eye, he could manifest the mountains, the ocean, the rivers, the moonlit valleys, torrential rain, the gait of the swan and the elephant, a tornado, the opening of the lotus flowers and a lot else. To see him do it was to know that he was a non-pareil”
- P. T. Narendra Menon (noted art critic and poet), 1990”

Mani Madhava Chakyar (1899–1990) Indian actor

Source: Abhinaya and Netrābhinaya, P.T. Narendra Menon, Kulapati of Koodiyattam, Sruti- India's premier Music and Dance magazine, August 1990 issue (71).

Art, Flowers

“Of all the fire-mountains which, like beacons, once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: 1900s, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 1: The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West

“But the conventional narrative is lumpy, a story that glosses what passes for quiescence to focus on "events": the appearance of Lewis and Clark and [Father Jean Pierre] DeSmut, the removal of the native Salish people, the arrival of the railroads, irrigation and logging and town-building, booms in sheep, busts in apples. Settlement, local politics, participation in the nation's wars, schemes to make money. And now the resources are tourism and real estate based on scenery and an amenity lifestyle in a mountain paradise. These seem to be what we think of as history.”

Dan Flores (1948) American historian

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)

Money, War, People, History

“[Concerning the founding of the Sierra Club] Hoping that we will be able to do something for wildness and make the mountains glad.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

letter to Henry Senger http://digitalcollections.pacific.edu/cdm/ref/collection/muirletters/id/14187/show/14186 (22 May 1892) 1890s

Hope

“The mountains dwindled away into hills covered with a dark, stunted scrub. Beyond them the land flattened out to the horizon, a treeless immensity of white and gray-green, a spongy mossiness flecked with a million icy ponds. The wind blew, sometimes hard, sometimes harder.”

Leigh Brackett (1915–1978) American novelist and screenwriter

Source: The Ginger Star (1974), Chapter 10 (p. 63)

“Next they passed the Sacred Mountain and the highlands where the Mossynoeci live in the mossynes or wooden houses from which they take their name. These people have their own ideas of what is right and proper. What we do as a rule openly in town or market-place they do at home; and what we do in the privacy of our houses they do out of doors in the open street, and nobody thinks the worst of them. Even the sexual act puts no one to blush in this community. On the contrary, like swine in the fields, they lie down on the ground in promiscuous intercourse and are not at all disconcerted by the presence of others. Then again, their king sits in the loftiest hut of all to dispense justice to his numerous subjects. But if the poor man happens to make a mistake in his findings, they lock him up and give him nothing to eat for the rest of the day.”

Apollonius of Rhodes book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book II. Onward to Colchis, Lines 1015–1029

People, Lie, Justice, Home

“The winter moon becomes a companion, the heart of the priest, sunk in meditation upon religion and philosophy, there in the mountain hall, is engaged in a delicate interplay and exchange with the moon; and it is this of which the poet sings.”

Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner

Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (1969)

Religion, Winter, Singing, Heart

“Reaching the summit of a mountain gives great satisfaction, but nothing for me has been more rewarding in life than the result of our climb on Everest, when we have devoted ourselves to the welfare of our Sherpa friends.”

Edmund Hillary (1919–2008) New Zealand mountaineer

As quoted in Great Climbs: A Celebration of World Mountaineering (1994) by Sir Chris Bonington

Life

“It's about the time I was riding my Motorcycle, going down a mountain road at 150 miles an hour, playing my guitar.”

Arlo Guthrie (1947) American folk singer

Spoken during some performances of the Motorcycle song, on how he wrote the song. Found on recordings on "Arlo, Live in Sydney, and the Significance of the Pickle".

Time

“Hold the door, say please, say thank you.
Don't steal, don't cheat, and don't lie.
I know you got mountains to climb, but always stay humble and kind.
When the dreams you're dreamin' come to you.
When the work you put in is realized.
Let yourself feel the pride, but always stay humble and kind.”

Tim McGraw (1967) American country singer

Humble and Kind
Song lyrics, Damn Country Music (2015)

Lie, Dreams, Feeling, Cheating

“In every country the mountains are fountains, not only of rivers but of men. Therefore we all are born mountaineers, the offspring of rock and sunshine.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

"From Fort Independence to Yosemite", San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin (part 6 of the 11 part series "Summering in the Sierra") dated September 1875, published 15 September 1875; reprinted in John Muir: Summering in the Sierra, edited by Robert Engberg (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) page 113
1870s

Men, Country