Frank Smythe Quotes & Sayings

If everything we do in life is to be measured in terms of money, then life would be a very poor thing. The greater ambitions and desires of mankind are actuated by something deeper and finer than the desire to amass material wealth. — Frank Smythe

It was cold. Space, the air we breathed, the yellow rocks, were deadly cold. There was something ultimate, passionless, and eternal in this cold. It came to us as a single constant note from the depths of space. We stood on the very boundary of life and death. — Frank Smythe

In no other pursuit is the best or the worst in a man brought out as in mountaineering. An old friend of civilization may be a useless companion on a mountain. — Frank Smythe

There is something about the Himalayas not possessed by the Alps, something unseen and unknown, a charm that pervades every hour spent among them, a mystery intriguing and disturbing. Confronted by them, a man loses his grasp of ordinary things, perceiving himself as immortal, an entity capable of outdistancing all changes, all decay, all life, all death. — Frank Smythe