Gary Snyder Quotes

#1. I don't think it is as a trope or as something in our psyches. There's very little wilderness out there but there is wild mind, and the Wild mind that actually, as Gary Snyder says, wants to take care of things. There's an elegant quality to the wild mind.

Anne Waldman

#2. Have big dreams but focus only on what you can control: your own thoughts, words and actions. This was Gandhi's way ... in the words of Buddhist poet Gary Snyder, our job is to move the world a millionth of an inch.

Eboo Patel

#3. Smith, I distrust any kind of Buddhism or any kinda philosophy or social system that puts down sex said Japhy (Gary Snyder)

Jack Kerouac

#4. Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild is an exquisite, far-sighted articulation of what freedom, wildness, goodness, and grace mean, using the lessons of the planet to teach us how to live.

Gretel Ehrlich

#5. I would say Gary Snyder, who is from my part of the world as a poet and environmental thinker, will be read just as Henry Thoreau as John Muir will continue to be read.

Robert Hass

#6. Once he gave her a Rothko book - an interesting choice, since like Elliott, Rothko also attended Lincoln High School in Portland (as had poet Gary Snyder and Simpsons creator Matt Groening). The

William Todd Schultz

#7. Zen aims at freedom but its practice is disciplined.

Gary Snyder

#8. 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

#9. Knowing where and who are intimately linked.

Gary Snyder

#10. A reading is a kind of communion. The poet articulates the semi-known for the tribe.

Gary Snyder

#11. I could almost love you again.

Gary Snyder

#12. the mind poet stays in the house / the house is empty and it has no walls / the poem is seen from all sides / everywhere / at once.

Gary Snyder

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. Each time you go that road it gets more straight.

Gary Snyder

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

Gary Snyder

#17. 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

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

Gary Snyder

#19. 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

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

Gary Snyder

#21. 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.

Gary Snyder

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

Gary Snyder

#23. They should listen to the unsaid words that resonate around the edge of the poem.

Gary Snyder

#24. When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off.

Gary Snyder

#25. 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

#26. Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.

Gary Snyder

#27. Read carefully, then don't read; work hard, then forget about it; know your tradition, then liberate yourself from it; learn language, then free yourself from it. Finally, know at least one form of magic.

Gary Snyder

#28. Streams and mountains never stay the same.

Gary Snyder

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

Gary Snyder

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

Gary Snyder

#31. True affluence is to not need anything.

Gary Snyder

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

Gary Snyder

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

Gary Snyder

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

Gary Snyder

#35. How Poetry Comes to Me

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

Gary Snyder

#36. Spring-water in the green creek is clear Moonlight on Cold Mountain is white Silent knowledge - the spirit is enlightened of itself Contemplate the void: this world exceeds stillness.

Gary Snyder

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

Gary Snyder

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

Gary Snyder

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. My love thoughts these days Come thick like the summer grass Which soon as cut and raked
Grows

Gary Snyder

#42. 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

#43. What use, Milton, a silly story
Of our lost general parents,
eaters of fruit?

Gary Snyder

#44. When men see Han-shan
They all say he's crazy
And not much to look at -
Dressed in rags and hides.
They don't get what I say
And I don't talk their language.
All I can say to those I meet:
Try and make it to Cold Mountain.

Gary Snyder

#45. Wildness is not just the "preservation of the world," it is the world

Gary Snyder

#46. the man who has the soul of the wolf
knows the self-restraint
of the wolf

Gary Snyder

#47. 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

#48. I wanted a good place to settle:
Cold Mountain would be safe.
Light wind in a hidden pine -
Listen close - the sound gets better.
Under it a gray haired man
Mumbles along reading Huang and Lao.
For ten years I havn't gone back home
I've even forgotten the way by which I came.

Gary Snyder

#49. 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.

Gary Snyder

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us.

Gary Snyder

#53. 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

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

Gary Snyder

#55. Deer love mushrooms.

Gary Snyder

#56. In Western Civilization, our elders are books.

Gary Snyder

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

Gary Snyder

#58. gentle and innocent as wolves
as tricky as a prince

Gary Snyder

#59. Thought is just an apprehension of touch.

Gary Snyder

#60. 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

#61. Oil the saw, sharpen axes,
Learn the names of all the peaks you see and which is highest-
there are hundreds-
Learn by heart the drainages between
Go find a shallow pool of snowmelt on a good day, bathe in the lukewarm water.

Gary Snyder

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

Gary Snyder

#63. 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

#64. stay together
learn the flowers
go light

Gary Snyder

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

Gary Snyder

#66. Around Jack (Kerouac) there circulated a palpable aura of fame and death.

Gary Snyder

#67. 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

#68. Goal: Clean air, clean clear-running rivers, the presence of Pelican and Osprey and Gray Whale in our lives; salmon and trout in our streams; unmuddied language and good dreams.

Gary Snyder

#69. 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

#70. True affluence is not needing anything.

Gary Snyder

#71. 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

#72. Doom scenarios, even though they might be true, are not politically or psychologically effective. The first step ... is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world.

Gary Snyder

#73. Clarity, especially in poetry, requires conceiving of your work as a collaborative act of imagination with the audience, thus affording them the deepest respect.

Gary Snyder

#74. But the poem was born elsewhere, and need not stay. Like the wild geese of the Arctic it heads home, far above the borders, where most things cannot cross.

Gary Snyder

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

Gary Snyder

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

Gary Snyder

#77. 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

#78. Great Brown Bear is walking with us, Salmon swimming upstream with us, as we stroll a city street.

Gary Snyder

#79. Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics

Gary Snyder

#80. 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

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

Gary Snyder

#82. The tribes were Berkeley, North Beach, Big Sur, Marin County, Los Angeles, and the host, Haight-Ashbury.

Gary Snyder

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

Gary Snyder

#84. White clouds gather and billow. Thin grass does for a mattress, The blue sky makes a good quilt. Happy with a stone underhead Let heaven and earth go about their changes.

Gary Snyder

#85. 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

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

Gary Snyder

#87. 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

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

Gary Snyder

#89. To work on behalf of the wild is to restore culture

Gary Snyder

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

Gary Snyder

#91. Switchback"

turn, turn,
and again,
hard scrabble
steep travel
ahead.

Gary Snyder

#92. 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