Gary Snyder > Quotes

“O, ah! The awareness of emptiness brings forth a heart of compassion!”
― Gary Snyder

“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”
― Gary Snyder

“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

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

“When the mind is exhausted of images, it invents its own.”
― Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold: Technical Notes & Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries

“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

“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

“stay together
learn the flowers
go light”
― Gary Snyder

“In this huge old occidental culture our teaching elders are books. Books are our grandparents!”
― Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

“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

“Range after range of mountains.
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.”
― Gary Snyder

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

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

“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

“With no surroundings there can be no path, and with no path one cannot become free.”
― Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

“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

“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, The Gary Snyder Reader, Volume 1: Prose, Poetry and Translations 1952-1998

“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

“I have a friend who feels sometimes that the world is hostile to human life--he says it chills us and kills us. But how could we be were it not for this planet that provided our very shape? Two conditions--gravity and a livable temperature range between freezing and boiling--have given us fluids and flesh. The trees we climb and the ground we walk on have given us five fingers and toes. The "place" (from the root plat, broad, spreading, flat) gave us far-seeing eyes, the streams and breezes gave us versatile tongues and whorly ears. The land gave us a stride, and the lake a dive. The amazement gave us our kind of mind. We should be thankful for that, and take nature's stricter lessons with some grace.”
― Gary Snyder

“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

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

“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

“The blue mountains are constantly walking." Dōgen is quoting the Chan master Furong. -- "If you doubt mountains walking you do not know your own walking."

-- Dōgen is not concerned with "sacred mountains" - or pilgrimages, or spirit allies, or wilderness as some special quality. His mountains and streams are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and non-being together. They are what we are, we are what they are. For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness. Roots, stems, and branches are all equally scratchy. No hierarchy, no equality. No occult and exoteric, no gifted kids and slow achievers. No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in wild.

So the blue mountains walk to the kitchen and back to the shop, to the desk, to the stove. We sit on the park bench and let the wind and rain drench us. The blue mountains walk out to put another coin in the parking meter, and go down to the 7-Eleven. The blue mountains march out of the sea, shoulder the sky for a while, and slip back to into the waters.”
― Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

“The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us.”
― Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild: With a New Preface by the Author

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

“The other side of the "sacred" is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”
― Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild

“And our conservationist-environmentalist-moral outrage is often (in its frustration) aimed at the logger or the rancher, when the real power is in the hands of people who make unimaginably larger sums of money, people impeccably groomed, excellently educated at the best universities - male and female alike - eating fine foods and reading classy literature, while orchestrating the investment and legislation that ruin the world.”
― Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild: With a New Preface by the Author

“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, The Old Ways

“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, Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft

“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