Explore Quotes by Gary Snyder

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Knowing where and who are intimately linked.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

stay together learn the flowers go light