Top 90 Gary Snyder Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”

— Gary Snyder

Featured in: Nature Quotes, Earth Day Quotes

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

— Gary Snyder

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

— Gary Snyder

4. “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

5. “The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom.”

— Gary Snyder

6. “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

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

— Gary Snyder

8. “Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.”

— Gary Snyder

9. “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

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

— Gary Snyder

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

— Gary Snyder

12. “The best thing you can do for the planet is to stay home.”

— Gary Snyder

13. “Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics.”

— Gary Snyder

14. “After weeks of watching the roof leak I fixed it tonight by moving a single board.”

— Gary Snyder

15. “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

16. “O, ah! The awareness of emptiness brings forth a heart of compassion!”

— Gary Snyder

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “To work on behalf of the wild is to restore culture.”

— Gary Snyder

21. “Though the nation is lost, the mountains and rivers remain” – Tu Fu.”

— Gary Snyder

22. “Streams and mountains never stay the same.”

— Gary Snyder

23. “Grandfather Space. The Mind is his Wife.”

— Gary Snyder

24. “You don’t want to be victimized by your lesser talents.”

— Gary Snyder

25. “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

26. “True affluence is not needing anything.”

— Gary Snyder

27. “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

28. “A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth. It is a quality of one’s own consciousness. The planet is a wild place and will always be.”

— Gary Snyder

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

— Gary Snyder

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

— Gary Snyder

31. “In Western Civilization, our elders are books.”

— Gary Snyder

32. “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

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

— Gary Snyder

34. “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

35. “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

36. “Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place.”

— Gary Snyder

37. “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

38. “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

39. “A great poet does not express his or her self; he expresses all of our selves.”

— Gary Snyder

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

— Gary Snyder

41. “There are two things that are really educational. One is being with a bunch of really smart people. The other is being all by yourself.”

— Gary Snyder

42. “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

43. “Deer love mushrooms.”

— Gary Snyder

44. “The other side of the “sacred” is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

— Gary Snyder

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

— Gary Snyder

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

49. “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

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

— Gary Snyder