Gary Snyder famous quotes

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

#Yoga #Buddhism #Positivity

We . . . must try to live without causing unnecessary harm, not just to fellow humans but to all beings. We must try not to be stingy, or to exploit others. There will be enough pain in the world as it is.
-- Gary Snyder

#Pain #Trying #World

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

#Responsibility #Environmental #Earth

In Western Civilization, our elders are books.
-- Gary Snyder

#Book #Civilization #Western

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

#Years #Mountain #Still In Love

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

#Nature #Order #Kind

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.
-- Gary Snyder

#Animal #Soul #Solitude

You should really know what the complete natural world of your region is and know what all its interactions are and how you are interacting with it yourself. This is just part of the work of becoming who you are, where you are.
-- Gary Snyder

#World #Becoming #Natural

Lay down these words Before your mind like rocks. placed solid, by hands In choice of place, set Before the body of the mind in space and time: Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall riprap of things: Cobble of milky way. straying planets, These poems, people, lost ponies with Dragging saddles -- and rocky sure-foot trails. The worlds like an endless four-dimensional Game of Go. ants and pebbles In the thin loam, each rock a word a creek-washed stone Granite: ingrained with torment of fire and weight Crystal and sediment linked hot all change, in thoughts, As well as things.
-- Gary Snyder

#Wall #Hands #Games

Being the Stream Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the stream or the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream, so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies. Meditation may take one out of the world, but it also puts one totally into it.
-- Gary Snyder

#Home #White #Water

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.
-- Gary Snyder

#Nature #Home #Earth

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
-- Gary Snyder

#Gratitude #Stars #Sky

Having a place means that you know what a place means...what it means in a storied sense of myth, character and presence but also in an ecological sense...Integrating native consciousness with mythic consciousness
-- Gary Snyder

#Character #Mean #Consciousness

Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking, brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness.
-- Gary Snyder

#Gratitude #Play #Simplicity

Sometime in the last ten years the best brains of the Occident discovered to their amazement that we live in an Environment. This discovery has been forced on us by the realization that we are approaching the limits of something.
-- Gary Snyder

#Discovery #Years #Brain

In the belly of the furnace of creativity is a sexual fire; the flames twine about each other in fear and delight. The same sort of coiling, at a cooler, slower pace, is what the life of this planet looks like. The enormous spirals of typhoons, the twists and turns of mountain ranges and gorges, the waves and the deep ocean currents - a dragonlike writhing.
-- Gary Snyder

#Life #Ocean #Creativity

Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order. In ecology we speak of "wild systems." When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the Assembly of All Beings is in no way regressive.
-- Gary Snyder

#Order #Ecosystems #Diversity

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

#Heart #Size #Members

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

#Dog #Coffee #Sleep

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.
-- Gary Snyder

#Adventure #Humility #Practice

True affluence is not needing anything.
-- Gary Snyder

#Affluence

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

#Heart #Compassion #Emptiness

True affluence is to not need anything.
-- Gary Snyder

#Needs #Affluence

As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.
-- Gary Snyder

#Ignorance #Animal #Solitude

Bearing in his right paw the shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances, cut the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war; His left paw in the Mudra of Comradely Display - indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions, and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma...
-- Gary Snyder

#War #Cutting #Animal

What is any religion? A little ritual, a little superstition, and some magic. It's not a strictly spiritual affair; it has psychological roles to fulfill. You might not want it to be a religion based on your own experience but that's like wanting to clean up your dreams
-- Gary Snyder

#Dream #Spiritual #Magic

In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.
-- Gary Snyder

#Years #Two #Giving

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

#Rap #Land #Jail

For several centuries Western civilization has had a drive for material accumulation, continual extensions of economic power, termed 'progress'...The longing for growth is not wrong. The nub of the problem is how to flip over, as in jujitsu, the magnificent growth energy of modern civilization into a nonacquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and nature.
-- Gary Snyder

#Self #Civilization #Growth

Thought is just an apprehension of touch.
-- Gary Snyder

#Apprehension

In Paul Friedrich's book Proto-Indo-European Trees he identifies the "semantic primitives" of the Indo-European tribe of languages through a group of words that have not changed much through twelve thousand years - and those are tree names: especially birch, willow, adler, elm, ash, apple and beech (bher, wyt, alysos, ulmo, os, abul, bhago). Seed syllables, bija, of the life of the west.
-- Gary Snyder

#Book #Years #Names

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

#Nature #Moving #Boards

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.
-- Gary Snyder

#Islands #Turtles #Ecosystems

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

#Rocks #Bird #Speak

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.
-- Gary Snyder

#Hate #Gone #Done

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.
-- Gary Snyder

#Sight #Cities #San Francisco

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.
-- Gary Snyder

#Love You #Oregon #America

Forests in the tropics are cut to make pasture to raise beef for the American market. Our distance from the source of our food enables us to be superficially more comfortable, and distinctly more ignorant.
-- Gary Snyder

#Distance #Cutting #Ignorant

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

#Consciousness #Should #Standards

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.
-- Gary Snyder

#Doors #Years #Car

But if you do know what is taught by plants and weather, you are in on the gossip and can feel truly at home. The sum of a field's forces [become] what we call very loosely the 'spirit of the place.' To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made or parts, each of which in a whole. You start with the part you are whole in.
-- Gary Snyder

#Home #Weather #Gossip

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

#Path #Surroundings

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.
-- Gary Snyder

#Philosophy #People #Trying

stay together learn the flowers go light
-- Gary Snyder

#Flower #Light #Together

There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea.
-- Gary Snyder

#Coffee #Dirty #Beer

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

#Stupid #Forgiven #Humans

Clambering up the Cold Mountain path, The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on: The long gorge choked with scree and boulders, The wide creek, the mist-blurred grass. The moss is slippery, though there's been no rain The pine sings, but there's no wind. Who can leap the world's ties And sit with me among the white clouds?
-- Gary Snyder

#Rain #Clouds #Wind

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.
-- Gary Snyder

#Dark #Water #Waiting

Today we are aware as never before of the plurality of human life-styles and possibilities, while at the same time being tied, like in an old silent movie, to a runaway locomotive rushing headlong toward a very singular catastrophe
-- Gary Snyder

#Rushing #Style #Today

The Buddha taught that all life is suffering. We might also say that life, being both attractive and constantly dangerous, is intoxicating and ultimately toxic. 'Toxic' comes from toxicon, Pendell tells us, with a root meaning of 'a poisoned arrow.' All organic life is struck by the arrows of real and psychic poisons. This is understood by any true, that is to say, not self-deluding, spiritual path.
-- Gary Snyder

#Spiritual #Real #Self

Knowing where and who are intimately linked.
-- Gary Snyder

#Home #Knowing

Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place.
-- Gary Snyder

#Home #World #Natural

The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void.
-- Gary Snyder

#Self #East #Void

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

#Home #Space #Body

Wildness is not just the "preservation of the world," it is the world
-- Gary Snyder

#World #Wilderness #Preservation

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.
-- Gary Snyder

#Ignorance #Mind #Trying

I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.
-- Gary Snyder

#Girl #Children #Writing

Wherever man exists, he finds the need to redesign, to recreate the world. A more beautiful world, purer, sweeter smelling and more colorful. A garden is probably the spot where the hopes for civilization are best captured. In fact, man defines himself by his garden. My Grandmother standing wordless fifteen minutes Between rows of loganberries, clippers poised in her hand.
-- Gary Snyder

#Beautiful #Grandmother #Men

I never did know exactly what was meant by the term "The Beats," but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen Ginsberg, myself, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory Corso, for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years.
-- Gary Snyder

#Years #Vision #Criticism

Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.
-- Gary Snyder

#Humility #Balance #Spirit

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

#Grandmother #Garden #Hands

Grandfather Space. The Mind is his Wife
-- Gary Snyder

#Stars #Space #Wife

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

#Lessons #Etiquette #Walking

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

#Fire #Dormant #Flood

Streams and mountains never stay the same.
-- Gary Snyder

#Mountain #Streams

When making an axe handle the pattern is not far off.
-- Gary Snyder

#Patterns #Handle

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

#Summer #Rocks #Air

Like, when we did Parliament and Funkadelic and Bootsy, it was actually one thing. But there were so many people that you could split them up into different groups. And then, when we went out on tour and they [the record companies] would see us all up there together - we had five, six guitars playing at one time, not including the bass! -, they said: "Wait a minute, that's just one whole group, selling different names!" But it wasn't - we had enough people in the group that each member would have a section to be another group. So now we're finally starting to get them to understand that.
-- Gary Snyder

#Guitar #Names #People