I started the whole 'Into Thin Air' thing - nothing I'm proud of.

The museum at Ortles is dedicated to the world of ice so we wanted visitors to feel like they were inside a glacier.

Climbing is not a competition, and you cannot talk in terms of 'greatest,' it means nothing.

For years I was a rock climber and nothing else. I went to school, yes, and university, yes, but in my heart I was a rock climber.

I would never bring a flag on the summit. If somebody is climbing for a country he is not normal, he is sick.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.