Top 90 Gary Snyder Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.”

— Gary Snyder

52. “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

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

— Gary Snyder

54. “Clouds sink down the hills Coffee is hot again. The dog Turns and turns about, stops and sleeps.”

— Gary Snyder

55. “Great Brown Bear is walking with us, Salmon swimming upstream with us, as we stroll a city street.”

— Gary Snyder

56. “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

57. “The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us.”

— Gary Snyder

58. “The wild-often dismissed as savage and chaotic by “civilized” thinkers, is actually impartially, relentlessly, and beautifully formal and free. Its expression-the richness of plant and animal life on the globe including us, the rainstorms, windstorms, and calm spring mornings-is the real world, to which we belong.”

— Gary Snyder

59. “Zen aims at freedom but its practice is disciplined.”

— Gary Snyder

60. “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

61. “They should listen to the unsaid words that resonate around the edge of the poem.”

— Gary Snyder

62. “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

63. “Not long ago the forests were our depth, a sun-dappled underworld, an inexhaustible timeless source. Now they are vanishing.”

— Gary Snyder

64. “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

65. “Thought is just an apprehension of touch.”

— Gary Snyder

66. “A community needs it’s elders to continue. Just as you could not grow culture out of a population of kindergarten children, a forest cannot realize its own natural potential without the seed-reservoirs, root-fungus threads, birdcalls and magical deposits of tiny feces that are the gift from the old to the young. Chris Maser says, “We need ancient forests for the survival of ancient forests.”

— Gary Snyder

67. “Place and the scale of space must be measured against our bodies and their capabilities.”

— Gary Snyder

68. “Every boulder on a talus slope is different, no two needles on a fir tree are identical. How could one part be more central, more important, than any other?”

— Gary Snyder

69. “Knowing where and who are intimately linked.”

— Gary Snyder

70. “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

71. “A reading is a kind of communion. The poet articulates the semi-known for the tribe.”

— Gary Snyder

72. “We all receive, every day, the gifts of the Deep World, from the air we breathe to the food we eat.”

— Gary Snyder

73. “My Grandmother standing wordless fifteen minutes Between rows of loganberries, clippers poised in her hand.”

— Gary Snyder

74. “Each time you go that road it gets more straight.”

— Gary Snyder

75. “Like imagination and the body, language rises unbidden.”

— Gary Snyder

76. “You must realize that these are abnormal times and there’s no way that any of us can keep ourselves pure.”

— Gary Snyder

77. “If we are lucky we may eventually arrive at a totally integrated world culture with matrilineal descent, free-form marriage, natural credit communist economy, less industry, far less population and lots more national parks.”

— Gary Snyder

78. “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

79. “There are paths that can be followed, and there is a path that cannot- it is not a path, it is the wilderness. There is a “going” but no goer, no destination, only the whole field.”

— Gary Snyder

80. “What I like most about Buddhism really is its fearlessness. So much of what warps people is fear of death and fear of impermanence. So much of what we do is simply strategies to try and hold back death, trying to buy time with material things. So at its best Buddhism provides people with a way of seeing their own frailty: you need less in the way of material objects and fortresses around yourself.”

— Gary Snyder

81. “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

82. “We are, after all, an animal that was brought into being on this biosphere by these processes of sun and water and lead. And if we depart too far from them, we’re departing too far from the mother, from our heritage.”

— Gary Snyder

83. “The truly experienced person, the refined person, delights in the ordinary.”

— Gary Snyder

84. “In the Western Hemisphere we have only the tiniest number of buildings that can be called temples or shrines. The temples of our hemisphere will be some of the planet’s remaining wilderness areas.”

— Gary Snyder

85. “If you have an understanding and cannot express it, then your understanding is not yet complete.”

— Gary Snyder

86. “If we made such good use of animals, eating them, singing about them, drawing them, riding them, and dreaming about them, what do they get back from us?”

— Gary Snyder

87. “Don’t imagine that we’re doing ecological politics to save the world. We’re doing ecological politics to save ourselves, to save our souls. It’s a personal exercise in character and in manners. It’s a matter of etiquette. It’s a matter of living right. It’s not that the planet requires us to be good to it. It’s that we must do it because it’s an aesthetic and ethical choice.”

— Gary Snyder

88. “I don’t think it would be apprpriate for a man to call himself a feminist.”

— Gary Snyder

89. “There is no sight moves me more than the jagged Olympics floating above the islands and inlets of Puget Sound.”

— Gary Snyder

90. “Wildness is not just the “preservation of the world,” it is the world.”

— Gary Snyder