Gary Snyder Quotes

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance beween spirit and humility.

Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.

Wildness It is perennially within us, dormant as a hard-shelled seed, awaiting the fire or flood that awakes it again.

Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.

Range after range of mountains. Year after year after year. I am still in love.

When the mind is exhausted of images, it invents its own.

I hold the most archaic values on earth ... the fertility of the soul, the magic of the animals, the power-vision in solitude.... the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.

The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom.

Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.

In Western Civilization, our elders are books.

Revolutionary consciousness is to be found among the most ruthlessly exploited masses: animals, trees, water, air, grasses

The size of the place that one becomes a member of is limited only by the size of one’s heart.

True affluence is to not need anything.

Gratitude to the Great Sky who holds billions of stars - and goes yet beyond that - beyond all powers, and thoughts and yet is within us - Grandfather Space. The Mind is his Wife

Streams and mountains never stay the same.

Why should the peculiarities of human consciousness be the narrow standard by which other creatures are judged?

With no surroundings there can be no path, and with no path one cannot become free.

The best thing you can do for the planet is to stay home.

Wildness is not just the "preservation of the world," it is the world

All this new stuff goes on top turn it over, turn it over wait and water down from the dark bottom turn it inside out let it spread through Sift down even. Watch it sprout. A mind like compost.

Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.

To work on behalf of the wild is to restore culture

You don't want to be victimized by your lesser talents.

After weeks of watching the roof leak I fixed it tonight by moving a single board

stay together learn the flowers go light

A great poet does not express his or her self; he expresses all of our selves.

Clouds sink down the hills Coffee is hot again. The dog Turns and turns about, stops and sleeps.

Thought is just an apprehension of touch.

I pledge allegiance to the soil of Turtle Island, and to the beings who thereon dwell one ecosystem in diversity under the sun With joyful interpenetratio n for all.

True affluence is not needing anything.

I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.

Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place.

Knowing where and who are intimately linked.

All those years and their moments— Crackling bacon, slamming car doors, Poems tried out on friends, Will be one more archive, One more shaky text.

O, ah! The awareness of emptiness brings forth a heart of compassion!

I recalled when I worked in the woods and the bars of Madras, Oregon. That short-haired joy and roughness America your stupidity. I could almost love you again.

I don't know of any other city where you can walk through so many culturally diverse neighborhoods, and you're never out of sight of the wild hills. Nature is very close here.

I never find words right away. Poems for me always begin with images and rhythms, shapes, feelings, forms, dances in the back of my mind.

Burning the small dead branches broke from beneath thick spreading whitebark pine. A hundred summers snowmelt rock and air hiss in a twisted bough.

Place and the scale of space must be measured against our bodies and their capabilities.

Zen aims at freedom but its practice is disciplined.

I thought, that day I started, I sure would hate to do this all my life, And dammit, that’s just what I’ve gone and done.

All that we did was human, stupid, easily forgiven, Not quite right.

My Grandmother standing wordless fifteen minutes Between rows of loganberries, clippers poised in her hand.

You run into people who want to write poetry who don't want to read anything in the tradition. That's like wanting to be a builder but not finding out what different kinds of wood you use.

If, after obtaining Buddhahood, anyone in my land gets tossed in jail on a vagrancy rap, may I not attain highest perfect enlightenment.

Will be but corpses dressed in frocks, who cannot speak to birds or rocks.

The other side of the "sacred" is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.

Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics