Gary Snyder Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Gary Snyder
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
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
This dream pops. it was real: and it lasted forever.

Gary Snyder
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
Better, the perfect, easy discipline of the swallows dip and swoop, without east or west.

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

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

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

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

Gary Snyder
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