Peter Matthiessen Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?

Peter Matthiessen
Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can never be sculpture. It can be elegant and very beautiful, but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts — or predetermined forms — it cannot fly.

Peter Matthiessen
In zazen, one is one's present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once.

Peter Matthiessen
The Zen expression Kill the Buddha! means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself.

Peter Matthiessen
I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange... There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, and ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea.

Peter Matthiessen
We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread.

Peter Matthiessen
There's an elegiac quality in watching [American wilderness] go, because it's our own myth, the American frontier, that's deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I've seen, and their kids will see nothing; there's a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now.

Peter Matthiessen
How could I say that I wished to penetrate the secrets of the mountains in search of something still unknown that, like the yeti, might well be missed for the very fact of searching?

Peter Matthiessen
Where to begin? Do we measure the relaxing of the feet? The moment when the eye glimpses the hawk, when instinct functions? For in this pure action, this pure moving of the bird, there is no time, no space, but only the free doing-being of this very moment -now!

Peter Matthiessen
When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.

Peter Matthiessen
In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.

Peter Matthiessen
I used The Paris Review as a cover, there's no question of that, but the C.I.A. had nothing to do with Paris Review.

Peter Matthiessen
In another life — this isn't what I know, but how I feel — these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one's own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon — the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the upper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again into the sky.

Peter Matthiessen
Only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.

Peter Matthiessen
Figures dark beneath their loads pass down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by the streak of sunset upon their shoulders.

Peter Matthiessen
The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at extraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-in-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.

Peter Matthiessen
The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoliation of a continent which we once confused with progress.

Peter Matthiessen
Soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.

Peter Matthiessen
Simultaneously I am myself, the child I was, the old man I will be.

Peter Matthiessen
The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that I have found what I was searching for without ever having discovered what it was.

Peter Matthiessen
It is related that Sakyamuni [the historical Buddha] once dismissed as of small consequence a feat of levitation on the part of a disciple, and cried out in pity for a yogin by the river who had spent twenty years of his human existence learning to walk on water, when the ferryman might have taken him across for a small coin.

Peter Matthiessen
The sun is roaring, it fills to bursting each crystal of snow. I flush with feeling, moved beyond my comprehension, and once again, the warm tears freeze upon my face. These rocks and mountains, all this matter, the snow itself, the air- the earth is ringing. All is moving, full of power, full of light.

Peter Matthiessen