Summits Quotes & Sayings

Those who found nothing on the plains will find nothing on the summits of mountains! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Global summits are necessary to discuss and strategise, but will never be the platform that will uproot the seeds of hatred, intolerance, polluted beliefs and passionate convictions that fuel whatever we term terrorism. The excelling leader should be thinking of dealing with the soil and the seed, how do you make sure the soil is not polluted and how do you counter the retrogressive seed that is being planted? — Archibald Marwizi

The birds sang in the dust
in an elaborate weave, ambiguous,
deafening, prey to existence
poor passions lost between the modest
summits of groves of mulberry and elder;
and I, like them, in secluded places
reserved for the lost and pure,
would wait for evening to fall,
for the silent smells of fire
and joyous misery to fill the air,
for the Angelus bell to toll, veiled
in the new peasant mystery
fulfilled in the ancient mystery. — Pier Paolo Pasolini

Climb to the summits not to defeat the mountains but to ease their lonelinesses! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

To see the big picture, get out of the dark valleys, climb to the sunny summits! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Each year, it is necessary to respire, to take breath again, to revive ourselves at the great living sources that forever keep their eternal freshness. Where can we find them if not at the cradle of our race, on the sacred summits from where descend the Indus and the Ganges ... ? — Jules Michelet

I have defended the interests of France at the G8 in Washington; afterwards I was at Chicago to announce the withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan; I have participated in two European summits, so I have fully respected the engagements I made to the French. — Francois Hollande

Soon, the sums pledged at the Koch donor summits began to soar from the $13 million that Sean Noble raised in June 2009 to nearly $900 million at a single fund-raising session in the years that followed. "This Supreme Court decision essentially gave a Good Housekeeping seal of approval," acknowledged Steven Law, president of American Crossroads, the conservative super PAC formed by the Republican political operative Karl Rove soon after the Citizens United decision. — Jane Mayer

Asked them if they supposed a nation of people ever existed, who, with a free vote in every man's hand, would elect that a single family and its descendants should reign over it forever, whether gifted or boobies, to the exclusion of all other families - including the voter's; and would also elect that a certain hundred families should be raised to dizzy summits of rank, and clothed on with offensive transmissible glories and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation's families - including his own . They all looked unhit, and said they didn't know; that they had never thought about it before, and it hadn't ever occurred to them that a nation could be so situated that every man could have a say in the government. — Mark Twain

Capes are the poetic points of continents. They are the summits of our sailing souls. — Kaci Cronkhite

Mountains are cathedrals: grand and pure, the houses of my religion. I go to them as humans go to worship ... From their lofty summits, I view my past, dream of the future, and with unusual acuity I am allowed to experience the present moment. My strength renewed, my vision cleared, in the mountains I celebrate creation. On each journey I am reborn. — Anatoli Boukreev

The highest summits and those elevated above the level of other things are mostly blasted by envy as by a thunderbolt. — Lucretius

Living a life is much like climbing mountains-the summits are always further off than you think, but when a man has a goal, he always feels he's working toward something. — Louis L'Amour

Have you ever sailed across an ocean, Donald? On a sail boat surrounded by sea with no land in sight. Without even the possibility of sighting land for days to come. To stand at the helm of your destiny. I want that, one more time. I want to be in the Piazza Del Campo in Sienna. To feel the surge as ten race horses go thundering by. I want another meal in Paris, at L'Ambroisie in the Place Des Vosges. I want another bottle of wine. And then another. I want the warmth of a women in the cool set of sheets. One more night of jazz at the Vanguard. I want to stand on summits and smoke cubans and feel the sun on my face for as long as I can. Walk on the wall again. Climb the tower. Ride the river. Stare at the frescoes. I want to sit in the garden and read one more good book. Most of all I want to sleep. I want to sleep like I slept when I was a boy. Give me that. Just one time. — Anonymous

The world can no more have two summits than a circumference can have two centres. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Be patient, my friends; time rolls rapidly away; our longing has its end. The hour will strike, who knows how soon?- when the maternal lap of everlasting Love shall be opened to us, and the full peace of God breathe around us from the palmy summits of Eden. — Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher

Since its sudden birth the city had expanded, swallowing up acre upon acre of the surrounding grasslands and drawing thousands into its domain. Hardly built on the most advantageous ground, miles from the open waters, decades from the mines at the mountain summits, it yet remained the only settlement of note on the isle. This sprawling mass of a city, once a compact kingdom, was now the keystone of the Castilian Empire. — R.D. Shanks

As truth is nonexistent, it can never be anything but illusion - but illusion, the by-product of revealing artifice, can reach the summits nearer the unobtainable peak of Perfect Truth. For example, female impersonators. The impersonator is in fact a man (truth), until he re-creates himself as a woman (illusion) and of the two, the illusion is the truer. — Truman Capote

Mother of light! how fairly dost thou go Over those hoary crests, divinely led! Art thou that huntress of the silver bow Fabled of old? Or rather dost thou tread Those cloudy summits thence to gaze below, Like the wild chamois from her Alpine snow, Where hunters never climbed
secure from dread? — Thomas Hood

The fleeting hour of life of those who love the hills is quickly spent, but the hills are eternal. Always there will be the lonely ridge, the dancing beck, the silent forest; always there will be the exhilaration of the summits. These are for the seeking, and those who seek and find while there is still time will be blessed both in mind and body. — Alfred Wainwright

Safety lies in tending towards our highest and not in resting content with an inferior potentiality ... To rest in or follow after an inferior potentiality may seem safe, rational, comfortable, easy, but it ends badly, in some futility or in a mere circling down the abyss or in a stagnant morass. Our right and natural road is towards the summits. — Sri Aurobindo

As one whose genius has been duly certified by several dozen learned biographers, I think I may say a word or two on the topic of intellectual summits; which is simply that clarity of thought is a shining point in a vast expanse of unrelieved darkness. Genius is not so much a light as it is a constant awareness of the surrounding gloom, and its typical cowardice is to bathe in its own glow and avoid, as much as possible, looking out beyond its boundary. — Stanislaw Lem

I know now that what countries do at summits has the power to help girls in Pakistan, Nigeria or Afghanistan. — Malala Yousafzai

It has been observed in all ages that the advantages of nature or of fortune have contributed very little to the promotion of happiness; and that those whom the splendour of their rank, or the extent of their capacity, have placed upon the summits of human life, have not often given any just occasion to envy in those who look up to them from a lower station; whether it be that apparent superiority incites great designs, and great designs are naturally liable to fatal miscarriages; or that the general lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention, have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality only been more conspicuous than others, not more frequent, or more severe. — Samuel Johnson

The splendour falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story: The long light shakes across the lakes, And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

Mountains have the power to call us into their realms and there, left forever, are our friends whose great souls were longing for the heights. Do not forget the mountaineers who have not returned from the summits. — Anatoli Boukreev

In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits. — Reinhold Messner

In Madame Bovary Flaubert never allows anything to go on too long; he can suggest years of boredom in a paragraph, capture the essence of a character in a single conversational exchange, or show us the gulf between his soulful heroine and her dull-witted husband in a sentence (and one that, moreover, presages all Emma's later experience of men). ( ... ) This is one of the summits of prose art, and not to know such a masterpiece is to live a diminished life. — Michael Dirda

When God made the world he made the big plain just for the cavalry. It was firm, or would be when the sun had dried off the night's rain, and it was mostly level. The sabres could fall like scythes in the corn. The Arapiles, Greater and Lesser, God made for the gunners. From their summits, conveniently made flat so that the artillery could have a stable platform, the guns could dominate the plain. God had made nothing for the infantry, except a soil easily dug into graves, but the infantry were used to that. All — Bernard Cornwell

Here life goes on, even and monotonous on the surface, full of lightning, of summits and of despair, in its depths. We have now arrived at a stage in life so rich in new perceptions that cannot be transmitted to those at another stage - one feels at the same time full of so much gentleness and so much despair - the enigma of this life grows, grows, drowns one and crushes one, then all of a sudden in a supreme moment of light one becomes aware of the sacred. — May Sarton

Continental Drift

you have moved through
like an ice flow-
steady slow substantial

tumble of glacial tongue
sweeping through
valleys reshaped

you arrived on your own epic time
patient and thorough
meltwater firn crevasse and all

lifting rocks on shifting plates
smoothing edges
and moving the very axes of my teeth

you soothed over rifts and fault lines
leaving me
newly minted

peaked and ridged
steep and crested
sloped and spurred

Hillsides lush
and summits glistening
I rush to a new dawn

but not without raw traces
of your tender era
scratched warmly on my every acre — Nancy Boutilier

The world of high-stakes international diplomacy can be rough and tumble, but it's more often than not a procession of suits and summits, protocol sessions and photo ops. — Douglas Brinkley

A healthy Christian life cannot be stitched together from a series of disjointed mountain-top experiences. We need a Christian spirituality that endures the shadowy, low-lying valleys and the rocky slopes in between all those glorious summits. — Andrew Byers

May your dreams be larger than mountains and may you have the courage to scale their summits. — Harley King

Occasionally there came gusts of winds, breezes from the sea rolling in one sweep over the whole plateau of the Caux country, which brought even to these fields a salt freshness. The rushes, close to the ground, whistled; the branches trembled in a swift rustling, while their summits, ceaselessly swaying, kept up a deep murmur. — Gustave Flaubert

Our life is like a land journey, too even and easy and dull over long distances across the plains, too hard and painful up the steep grades; but, on the summits of the mountain, you have a magnificent view
and feel exalted
and your eyes are full of happy tears
and you want to sing
and wish you had wings! And then
you can't stay there, but must continue your journey
you begin climbing down the other side, so busy with your footholds that your summit experience is forgotten. — Lloyd C. Douglas

Before climbing the summits, you must first walk in the down valleys! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Arab League summits often served as forums for letting off steam or ironing out differences. At times the way this took place was the stuff of caricature. — Yevgeny Primakov

There is, however, this consolation to the most way-worn traveler, upon the dustiest road, that the path his feet describe is so perfectly symbolical of human life,
now climbing the hills, now descending into the vales. From the summits he beholds the heavens and the horizon, from the vales he looks up to the heights again. He is treading his old lessons still, and though he may be very weary and travel-worn, it is yet sincere experience. — Henry David Thoreau

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long. — George Bernard Shaw

As children we have no appreciation of scenery because, having not yet stored similar scenes in our imagination, with their attendant emotions and circumstances, we perceive it without psychic depth. I now looked at the cloudcrowned summits with my — Gene Wolfe

We have not wings we cannot soar; but, we have feet to scale and climb, by slow degrees, by more and more, the cloudy summits of our time. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Man little knows what calamities are beyond his patience to bear till he tries them; as in ascending the heights of ambition, which look bright from below, every step we rise shows us some new and gloomy prospect of hidden disappointment; so in our descent from the summits of pleasure, though the vale of misery below may appear, at first, dark and gloomy, yet the busy mind, still attentive to its own amusement, finds, as we descend, something to flatter and to please. Still as we approach, the darkest objects appear to brighten, and the mortal eye becomes adapted to its gloomy situation. — Oliver Goldsmith

You can never feel the real power of the mountains until you start climbing their summits! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The thick stream of air hauled toward the summits
first the great horses of noise reared against the sky
then sluggishly the great limp octopus of smoke
a derisory spitter injecting the night with
the insolent perfume of a citronella lamp
and a wind swept down on the islands
to be riddled by the suspect violence of the locusts ... — Aime Cesaire

The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors.
They all need to go on safari together. — Thomas L. Friedman

Is a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies. They sigh one unto the other in that solitude. And stretch towards the heaven their long and ghastly necks. And nod to and fro their everlasting heads. And there is an indistinct murmur which cometh out from among them like the rushing of subterrene water. And they sigh unto the other ... And the tall primeval trees rock eternally hither and thither with a crashing and mighty sound. And from their high summits, one by one, drop everlasting dews. And at the roots strange poisonous flowers lie writhing in perturbed slumber. And overhead, with a rustling loud noise, the gray clouds rush westwardly forever, until they roll, a cataract, over the fiery wall of the horizon ... — Edgar Allan Poe

Trees that, like the poplar, lift upward all their boughs, give no shade and no shelter, whatever their height. Trees the most lovingly shelter and shade us, when, like the willow, the higher soar their summits, the lower drop their boughs. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits. — Karl Marx

I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealizations of life, all the idealizations which give life a double, which lead life toward it summits, which make the dreamer too live by splitting ... — Gaston Bachelard

The paths to mountain peaks are ever rugged, but men reach the summits. — Percy James Brebner

Joy must be one of the pivots of our life. It is the token of a generous personality. Sometimes it is also a mantle that clothes a life of sacrifice and self-giving. A person who has this gift often reaches high summits. He or she is like sun in a community. — Mother Teresa

Whence come the highest mountains? so did I once ask. Then did I learn that they come out of the sea.

That testimony is inscribed on their stones, and on the walls of their summits. Out of the deepest must the highest come to its height. — Friedrich Nietzsche

It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. ... We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them. — Henry David Thoreau

There were other, more subtle artistic effects. The slow shift of the light through each day caused shadows to drift, shorten and lengthen, producing constantly changing silhouettes. The summits of mountains, which might be pink in the mornings, turned violet and amaranth in the afternoon ... Like music, (these phenomena) created a feeling that was not there before — Alan Lightman

There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Remarkable places are like the summits of rocks; eagles and reptiles only can get there. — Suzanne Curchod

The contemplation of Mont Blanc's unchanging summits for three or four days last month, the sight of that eternal snow, immaculate, sublime in its whiteness and calm, was enough to restore to my soul a serenity it had not known for a long time. — George Sand

Who would attain to summits still and fair,Must nerve himself through valleys of despair. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

There was joy in getting his blood pressure down ... joy in climbing Mount Everest ... joy in reaching the summits of six more of the world's highest mountains ... joy in building a profitable company providing houses that people could turn into homes ... joy in learning to fly. But he will also tell you there has been no joy as great as giving from what God has blessed him with so that he might bless and serve others. That's the true and ultimate purpose of setting and reaching goals. — Zig Ziglar

I don't think more mega-summits is the way to secure effective implementation. — Anders Fogh Rasmussen

On the summits of these heights I found shells such as are picked up at the seaside. The Indians accounted for their appearance there by saying that once a great sea rolled over the face of the country and only one man in a boat escaped with his family. He had sailed about in the boat until the waters retired to their place, and, living there, became the father of all Indians. — Fanny Kelly

The canyon is a ladder to the plain. The valley is pale in the end of July, when the corn and melons come of age and slowly the fields are made ready for the yield, and a faint, false air of autumn - an illusion still in the land - rises somewhere away in the high north country, a vague suspicion of red and yellow on the farthest summits. And the town lies out like a scattering of bones in the heart of the land, low in the valley, where the earth is a kiln and the soil is carried here and there in the wind and all harvests are a poor survival of the seed. It is a remote place, and divided from the rest of the world by a great forked range of mountains on the north and west; by wasteland on the south and east, a region of dunes and thorns and burning columns of air; and more than these by time and silence. — N. Scott Momaday

The Long March The Red Army is not afraid of hardship on the march, the long march. Ten thousand waters and a thousand mountains are nothing. The Five Sierras meander like small waves, the summits of Wumeng pour on the plain like balls of clay. Cliffs under clouds are warm and washed below by the River Gold Sand. Iron chains are cold, reaching over the Tatu River. The far snows of Minshan only make us happy and when the army pushes through, we all laugh. October 1935 — Mao Zedong

Great men are rarely isolated mountain peaks; they are the summits of ranges. — Thomas W. Higginson

Doth not all nature around me praise God? If I were silent, I should be an exception to the universe. Doth not the thunder praise Him as it rolls like drums in the march of the God of armies? Do not the mountains praise Him when the woods upon their summits wave in adoration? Doth not the lightning write His name in letters of fire? Hath not the whole earth a voice? And shall I, can I, silent be? — Charles Spurgeon

A price has to be paid for success. Almost invariably those who have reached the summits worked harder and longer, studied and planned more assiduously, practiced more self- denial, overcame more difficulties than those of us who have not risen so far. — B.C. Forbes

To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Choose a summit; make a plan to reach there! If you think you can't make it, choose a new summit, make another plan. Or give up the summits, make new plans, find lower targets! In short, be 'flexible' in life! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides me; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of it surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garland crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can feel the woodland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.
-MARK TWAIN in an 1889 Dinner Speech at Delmonico's in New York to honor two baseball teams that had just returned from touring the Pacific, including Honolulu. — John Richard Stephens

In the stillness of the night I have walked in your streets, and my spirit has entered your houses,
And your heart-beats were in my heart, and your breath was upon my face, and I knew you all.
Aye, I knew your joy and your pain, and in your sleep your dreams were my dreams.
And oftentimes I was among you a lake among the mountains.
I mirrored the summits in you and the bending slopes, and even the passing flocks of your thoughts and your desires.
And to my silence came the laughter of your children in streams, and the longing of your youths in rivers. — Kahlil Gibran

Happiness is the struggle towards a summit and, when it is attained, it is happiness to glimpse new summits on the other side. — Fridtjof Nansen

Nations touch at their summits. — Walter Bagehot

Oh land of farms and green hills mild
Once formed by giants rough and wild
With massive paws they gripped and tore
With one great rip they formed the shore
Where heavy boots left prints so deep
Blue lakes remain 'tween summits steep
The giants fought beneath our skies
And from their bones our mountains rise — Shannon Hale

When I took part in European leaders summits, it was sometimes unpleasant for me to hear Romanian, Polish, Portuguese, and Italian friends speak English, although I admit that on an informal basis, first contacts can be made in this language. Nevertheless, I will defend everywhere the use of the French language. — Francois Hollande

It's no use crying over spilt summits. — Harold Macmillan

what summits would I not reach if my own life made the subject of the melody. — Jean-Paul Sartre

All the while Martin attempted to catch his aunt with a remorseful gaze, but the young woman was reabsorbed into her mother's orbit, and though Anna embraced him, pressed on him the importance of visiting soon, he could feel that she was already very far away, not really seeing him, but cruising with distant eyes and a feather's touch over the summits of all her disappointments. — Carola Perla

There is a place where the mountains tumble one upon the other off into the far distance, peak after treeless peak. Steep ridges connect them and deep canyons slash them apart. The grassy summits are wreathed with black sage. No roads intrude upon this jumble of oak-filled canyons and steep-sided hills, only the ambling trails made by deer, coyotes, and bears. The local Indians believe the spirits of the ancients still travel these roads. — R. Lawson Gamble

Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional climb among the pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built by Shakespeare and those others. — Mark Twain

Life is like topography, Hobbes. There are summits of happiness and success, flat stretches of boring routine and valleys of frustration and failure. — Bill Watterson

Resolve, and thou art free. But breathe the air
Of mountains, and their unapproachable summits
Will lift thee to the level of themselves. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I have known not a few men who, after reaching the summits of business success, found themselves miserable on attaining retirement age. They were so exclusively engrossed in their day to day affairs that they had no time for friend making. — B.C. Forbes

It is remarkable how weak international political responses have been. The failure of global summits on the environment make it plain that our politics are subject to technology and finance. — Pope Francis

The intellectual summits of my life had been completing my dissertation and publishing my book, and that was already more than ten years ago. Intellectual summits? Summits, full stop. In those days, at least, I'd felt justified. Since then I hadn't produced anything except a few short articles for the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies, plus a couple for The Literary Review, when some new book touched on my field of expertise. My articles were clear, incisive and brilliant. They were generally well received, especially since I never missed a deadline. But was that enough to justify a life? — Michel Houellebecq

International summits and organisations like WTO take decisions, which will bind us, and if we are not present in such summits, we may be hurt by the decisions taken. — Narendra Modi

Of course there are collaborations. But in official meetings with Western diplomats from the US and the European Union, the major issues of our relationships are simply not discussed. The topics are on climate change or any other issues they want us to agree with them on. But they never discuss how we could develop an equal relationship. They should stop using pompous orchestrated summits and begin a serious dialogue with small meetings. — Yoweri Museveni

There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with all the sonorities of phrase and summits of thought; and the other who digs and scratches for truth all he can, who is as interested in the little facts as the big ones, who would like to make you feel materially the things he reproduces. — Gustave Flaubert

There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates , who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery. — George Bernard Shaw

Have you remembrances, the glimmering arches that span the summits of the mind? — Kahlil Gibran

But the summits of poetry are mysteries; they are shiftingly veiled, and those who catch the glimpses see different aspects of the transcendental; but they have seen something, and they come down with the glory lingering on them. — Ruth Pitter

I went whenever I could, and always my eyes lifted to the hills. I was to find a spiritual and physical satisfaction in climbing mountains and a tranquil mind upon reaching their summits, as though I had escaped from the disappointments and unkindness of life and emerged above them into a new world, a better world. — Alfred Wainwright

[...] the foreign policy of any government [...] is a prolongation of its domestic policy. This is all to often forgotten in a period of 'summit' meetings, when the public is led to believe that three or four Big Men solve, or fail to solve, the world's predicaments according to whether they have or do not have the wisdom, the good will, or the magic wand needed for their task. — Isaac Deutscher

Mountains are both journey and destination. They summon us to climb their slopes, explore their canyons, and attempt their summits. The summit, despite months of preparation and toil, is never guaranteed though tastes of sweet nectar when reached. If my only goal as a teacher and mountaineer is the summit, I risk cruel failure if I do not reach the highest apex. Instead, if I accept the mountain's invitation to journey and create meaning in each step, success is manifest in every moment. — T.A. Loeffler

Birds will be bored
If I'd forgotten something
Ring the bells of those school dismissals in the sea
What we shall call pensive borage
We start by giving the solution to the contest
To wit how many tears can be held in a woman's hand
1. as little as possible
2. in a medium-sized hand
While I crumple this star-lit paper
And while the everlasting flesh has once and for all taken
possession of the mountain summits
I live like a recluse in a little house in the Vaucluse
Heart king's order — Andre Breton