Top 80 Peter Matthiessen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The purpose of our life is to help others through it.”

— Peter Matthiessen

2. “Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being.”

— Peter Matthiessen

3. “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

4. “You do your best work when you’re not conscious of yourself.”

— Peter Matthiessen

5. “Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn’t that wonderful?”

— Peter Matthiessen

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “Anyone who thinks they can save the world is both wrong and dangerous.”

— Peter Matthiessen

10. “In zazen, one is one’s present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once.”

— Peter Matthiessen

11. “In sexual abandon as in danger we are impelled, however briefly, into that vital present in which we do not stand apart from life, we ARE life, our being fills us, in ecstasy with another being, loneliness falls away into eternity. But in other days, such union was attainable through simple awe.”

— Peter Matthiessen

12. “The Zen expression “Kill the Buddha!” means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself.”

— Peter Matthiessen

13. “If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us.”

— Peter Matthiessen

14. “For some time I watch the coming of the night? Above is the glistening galaxy of childhood, now hidden in the Western world by air pollution and the glare of artificial light; for my children’s children, the power, peace and healing of the night will be obliterated.”

— Peter Matthiessen

15. “My eye is fixed not on the ending of the book but on the feeling of that ending.”

— Peter Matthiessen

16. “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

17. “Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all.”

— Peter Matthiessen

18. “No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.”

— Peter Matthiessen

19. “This world is painted on a wild dark metal.”

— Peter Matthiessen

20. “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

21. “In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth.”

— Peter Matthiessen

22. “For people who must live from day to day, past and future have small relevance, and their grasp of it is fleeting; they live in the moment, a very precious gift that we have lost.”

— Peter Matthiessen

23. “From Kathmandu there is a road through Gorkha Country to Pokhara, in the central foothills; farther west, no roads exist at all. The road winds through steep gorges of the Trisuli River, now in torrent; dirty whitecaps filled the rapids, and the brown flood was thickened every now and again by thunderous rockslides down the walls of the ravine.”

— Peter Matthiessen

24. “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

25. “I nod to Death in passing, aware of the sound of my own feet upon my path. The.”

— Peter Matthiessen

26. “I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land that my characters inhabit. I don’t want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape.”

— Peter Matthiessen

27. “There is a silence in the imminence of animals and also in the echo of their noise, but the dread silence is the one that rises from a wilderness from which all the wild animals have gone.”

— Peter Matthiessen

28. “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

29. “Life begins before a soul is born and commences once again with the act of dying, and as in the Afro-Asian symbol of the snake of eternity swallowing its tail, all is in flux, all comes full circle, with no beginning and no end.”

— Peter Matthiessen

30. “In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.”

— Peter Matthiessen

31. “And then there was the small matter of the snow leopard, whose terrible beauty is the very stuff of human longing. Its uncompromising yellow eyes, wired into the depths of its unfathomable spirit, gaze out from the cover of innumerable editions. It is, I think, the animal I would most like to be eaten by.”

— Peter Matthiessen

32. “It is difficult to adjust because I do not know who is adjusting; I am no longer that old person and not yet the new.”

— Peter Matthiessen

33. “Simultaneously I am myself, the child I was, the old man I will be.”

— Peter Matthiessen

34. “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

35. “And 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

36. “And it is a profound consolation, perhaps the only one, to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.”

— Peter Matthiessen

37. “If nobody is innocent, who can be guilty?”

— Peter Matthiessen

38. “This is a fine chance to let go, to “win my life by losing it,” which means not recklessness but acceptance, not passivity but nonattachment.”

— Peter Matthiessen

39. “And perhaps this is what Tukten knows – that the journey to Dolpo, step by step and day by day, is the Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus, the Tao, the Way, the Path, but no more so than small events of days at home.”

— Peter Matthiessen

40. “I think in any writing you’re paying attention to detail.”

— Peter Matthiessen

41. “Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.”

— Peter Matthiessen

42. “You could of heard a spider sip a breath.”

— Peter Matthiessen

43. “But the longing for Africa, once contracted, is an incurable condition which, like malaria, recurs again and again.”

— Peter Matthiessen

44. “Illuminated by the same joyful curiosity and erudition, lyric writing, and plain love of life that made a classic of Archie Carr’s The Windward Road.”

— Peter Matthiessen

45. “In fiction, you have a rough idea what’s coming up next – sometimes you even make a little outline – but in fact you don’t know. Each day is a whole new – and for me, a very invigorating – experience.”

— Peter Matthiessen

46. “The equatorial monsoons which brought a rainy season to the coasts had small effect here in the highlands, from moon to moon, the rainfall varied little. Winter, summer, autumn, spring were involuted, turning in upon themselves, a slow circling of time.”

— Peter Matthiessen

47. “It is said in Java that the tiger’s hearing is so acute that hunters must keep their nose hairs cut lest the tiger hear the breath whistle through their nostrils.”

— Peter Matthiessen

48. “Around about now, young John Owen comes out of the shack lugging my old musket from the War. At six years of age, our youngest boy already knew his business. Not a word, just brings the shooting iron somewhat closer so’s he don’t waste powder, then hoists her up, set to haul back on the trigger. I believe his plan was to shoot this feller, get the story later.”

— Peter Matthiessen

49. “I have never figured out how women work but I do know that their skin color has no significance. Black or white, every last one is pretty pink on the inside and they are all impossible.”

— Peter Matthiessen

50. “Be light, light, light – full of light!”

— Peter Matthiessen