“What is the use of climbing Mount Everest? It is of no use. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life.”

-George Mallory, English mountaineer, 1886-1924.

This quote is from the book Climbing Everest, which collects the personal writings of George Mallory, a legendary mountaineer known for his attempts at climbing Mount Everest. It’s part of a larger quote that discusses why people risk their lives to pursue the summit of a mountain:

People ask me, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is of no use.' There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron.

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.

Mallory is describing the feeling of achieving verticality, and he describes it as pure joy. For him, life itself was worth risking in pursuit of this feeling, and he died on Mount Everest attempting to be the first man to do it. This event is shrouded in mystery, however, because no one knows if he actually made the summit before he perished. If he did, he would’ve been the first person to do so.

Check out other posts that mention George Mallory here.


Quote taken from Mallory, George. Climbing Everest: The Complete Writings of George Mallory. London: Gibson Square, 2012.