Aron Ralston's Quotes

Bring love and peace and happiness and beautiful lives into the world in my honor. Thank you. Love you.

Judging by my degradation in the last 24 hours, I'll be surprised if I make it to Tuesday.

I was accustomed to being in far, far riskier environments. So I thought going into that canyon was a walk in the park - there were no avalanches, it was a beautiful day and I was essentially just walking.

And that's where I'm finally at today - my life is about being with my family. This is what's important.

I certainly made mistakes.

I feel like I'm climbing as well, if not better, than ever.

I kind of entered a flow state. I've been there before while climbing. You are not thinking ahead. You are just thinking about what is in front of you each second.

I limited myself to one shout a day. But I didn't like the sound of my voice. It sounded panicked, it sounded scared. And I knew from experience you can't hear more than 50 yards either way down a canyon.

I'd fallen in love with a woman but she broke up with me and I was devastated. Six months later, I went into a suicidal depression from the break-up of the relationship, but I resolved to not do what my friends had done. And so I reached out for help.

If you want someone to show up and help you if something bad happens, you'd better tell someone where you're going. And of course I wanted someone to know - but I'd made a choice and it was a choice I was going to have to live with.

What you're looking at there is my arm, going into the rock... and there it is - stuck. It's been without circulation for 24 hours. It's pretty well gone.

When I climb a fourteener, a 14,000-foot/4,260-meter peak, in the winter by myself, I leave an itinerary and information about where my vehicle will be parked and the name of the county sheriff to contact in case I don't get home.

A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.

Ask, 'How are we different from the great apes?' We have culture, we have civilisation, and we have language to be celebrated as part of being human.

Everyone knows that metaphors are important, yet we have no idea why.

If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we'd be terrified.

If you're a thinking person, the liver is interesting, but nothing is more intriguing than the brain.

It may well be our brains are wired up to be slightly more optimistic than they should be.

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.

Remember that politics, colonialism, imperialism and war also originate in the human brain.

The adage that fact is stranger than fiction seems to be especially true for the workings of the brain.

The brain abhors discrepancies.

The fact that hype exists doesn't prove that something is not important.

The minute you succumb to outside pressure, you cease to be creative.

You can't just take an image and randomly distort it and call it art - although many people in La Jolla where I come from do precisely that.

I was socially isolated as a kid. I had friends, but I wasn't very good at sports and that sort of thing so I became quite comfortable being by myself, exploring. The world was my private playground, and in it, I was supreme. Darwin, Faraday, Huxley and other great scientists were my companions.