The best that an American can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountain top where few have been, where few can follow, and where few will consent to believe that he has been.

-Kennan, George Frost
On negotiating with the Soviets. Quoted in Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas The Wise Men (1986).

Baedeker is astonishingly enduring; travellers can use nineteenth-century editions with confidence, providing they take some elementary precautions. Many hotels will long since have disappeared, and the prices will be somewhat different, but if Baedeker says'On leaving the tunnel, the best view is on the right', it probably still is, unless somebody has shifted the mountain, and his descriptions of sceneryand where to go to see it at its best are still valid, as ispracticallyall of his potted history.

-Levin, (Henry) Bernard
  Hannibal's Footsteps.

Verde que te quiero verde. Verde viento.Verdes ramas. El barco sobre la mar y el caballo en la montan‹  a. Green how I love you green. Green wind.Green boughs. The ship on the sea and the horse on the mountain.

-Lorca, Federico Garc|¤  a
^7  Romance sona¤  mbulo.

Proudly the note of the trumpet is sounding, Loudly the war-cries arise on the gale, Fleetly the steed by Loc Suilig is bounding To join the thick squadrons in Saimear's green vale. On, every mountaineer, Strangers to flight and fear: Rush to the standard of dauntless Red Hugh! Bonnought and gallowglass, Throng from each mountain-pass! On for old ErinöO'Donnell abu!

-McCann, M(ichael) J(oseph)
  The Spirit of the Nation,'O'Donnell  Abu'.

The love of field and coppice, Of green and shaded lanes, Of ordered woods and gardens Mackellar whiteman likeshimor not.If thewhiteman says he does, he is instantlyöand usually quite rightlyömistrusted. Is running in your veins. Strong love of grey-blue distance Brown streams and soft, dim skiesöI know but cannot share it, My love is otherwise. I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, Her beauty and her terrorö The wide brown land for me!

-Mackellar, (Isobel Marion) Dorothea
England, Half English, 'A Short Guide for  Jumbles'. 1905  'Core of My Heart', first published in the London Spectator. Collected as'My Country' in The Closed Door, and Other Verses (1911).

   [Plays that would] cut through time like a knife through a layer cake or a road through a mountain revealing its geologic layers.

-Miller, Arthur
  Describing the plays he always wished to write. Timebends:  A Life.

Morally, spiritually, we are fettered. What have we achieved in mowing down mountain ranges, harnessing the energy of mighty rivers, or moving whole populations about like chess pieces, if we ourselves remain the same restless, miserable, frustrated creatures we were before. To call such activity progress is utter delusion.

-Miller, Henry Valentine
  The World of Sex.

The Fujiyama of Architecture†at once a lofty mountain and a national shrine.

-Mumford, Lewis
  Of Frank Lloyd Wright.'A Phoenix Too Infrequent', in the NewYorker, 28 Nov.

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably inthe circuits of a digital computeror thegears of a cycle transmission ashe does at thetop of a mountainor in the petals of a flower.

-Pirsig, Robert M(aynard)
  Zen and theArt of Motorcycle Maintenance, pt.1, ch.1.

Tching prayed on the mountain and wroteon his bath tub. Day by day make it new cut underbrush, pile the logs keep it growing.

-Pound, Ezra Loomis
MAKE IT NEW 1954  The Cantos, no.53.

Great poetsseldommake bricks without straw.They pile up allthe excellencestheycanbeg, borrow, or steal from their predecessors and contemporaries and then set their own inimitable light atop the mountain.

-Pound, Ezra Loomis
Quoted in Patricia C Willis (ed) The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1986).

   He isgone on the mountain, He is lost to the forest, Like a summer-dried fountain, When our need was the sorest.

-Scott, Sir Walter
  The Lady of the Lake, canto 3, stanza16,'Coronach'.

   Like the dew on the mountain, Like the foam on the river, Like the bubble on the fountain, Thou art gone, and for ever!

-Scott, Sir Walter
  The Lady of the Lake, canto 3, stanza16,'Coronach'.

O Caledonia! stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child! Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, Land of the mountain and the flood. Land of my sires! what mortal hand Can e'er untie the filial band That knits me to thy rugged strand!

-Scott, Sir Walter
  The Lay of the Last Minstrel, canto 6, stanza 2.

I have never been able to decide whether, in mountain exploration, it is the prospect of tackling an unsolved problem, or the performance of the task itself, or the retrospective enjoyment of successful effort, which affords the greatest amount of pleasure.

-Shipton, Eric Earle
  Nanda Devi.

Come down,O maid, from yonder mountain height: What pleasure lives in height?

-Tennyson
  The Princess, pt.7, added song, l.1^2.

He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ringed with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

-Tennyson
  'The Eagle', complete poem.

If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know onlya few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, byany confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but reallyconcurring, laws, which Thoreau we have not detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness.

-Thoreau, Henry David
  Walden, or Life in theWoods,'The Pond inWinter'.

Some men go through life absolutely miserable because, despite the most enormous achievements, they just didn't do one thingölike the architect who didn't build St Paul's. I didn't quite build St Paul's, but I stood on more mountain tops than possibly I deserved.

-Thorneycroft, Lord (George Edward) Peter
  In the SundayTelegraph,11 Feb.

   I've climbed my last political mountain.

-Wallace, George Corley
  On retiring after being crippled in an assassination attempt. Quoted in the NewYorkTimes, 3 Apr1986.