Tom Bourdillon on reasons for climbing mountains:

One reason is never given openly, rather is disguised and hidden and never even allowed in suggestion, and I venture to think it is because it is really the inmost moving impulse in all true mountain-lovers, a feeling so deep and so pure and so personal as to be almost sacred – too intimate for ordinary mention. That is, the ideal joy that only mountains give – the unreasoned, uncovetous, unworldly love of them, we know not why, we care not why, only because they are what they are; because they move us in some way which nothing else does; so that some moment in a smoke-grimed railway carriage, when in the pure morning air the far-off cloud of Mont Blanc suddenly hung above the mists as we rounded the curves beyond Vallorbe, or, still fairer, from the slopes near Neuchâtel, the whole Bernese range slept dreamlike in the lake at our feet, lives in our memories above a hundred more selfish, more poignant joys; and we feel that a world that can give such rapture must be a good world, a life capable of such feeling must be worth the living.