Top 80 Yvon Chouinard Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s not an adventure until something goes wrong.”

— Yvon Chouinard

Featured in: Risk-Taking Quotes, Adventure Quotes, Climbing Quotes

2. “True adventure begins when everything goes wrong.”

— Yvon Chouinard

Featured in: Adventure Quotes, Climbing Quotes

3. “The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life; it’s so easy to make it complex.”

— Yvon Chouinard

Featured in: Simple Life Quotes

4. “How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top.”

— Yvon Chouinard

Featured in: Mountain Quotes, Climbing Quotes

5. “Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.”

— Yvon Chouinard

6. “Going back to a simpler life is not a step backwards.”

— Yvon Chouinard

7. “There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, “Oh it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything.” and an optimist who says, “Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyways. Either way, nothing happens.””

— Yvon Chouinard

8. “Going back to a simpler life based on living by sufficiency rather than excess is not a step backward. Rather, returning to a simpler way allows us to regain our dignity, puts us in touch with the land, and makes us value human contact again.”

— Yvon Chouinard

9. “To do good, you actually have to do something.”

— Yvon Chouinard

10. “I drive old cars, all my Patagonia clothes are years and years old, I hardly have anything new. I try to lead a very simple life. I am not a consumer of anything. And I much prefer sleeping on somebody’s floor than in a motel room.”

— Yvon Chouinard

11. “A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”

— Yvon Chouinard

12. “The revolution starts at the bottom.”

— Yvon Chouinard

13. “The word adventure has gotten overused. For me, when everything goes wrong – that’s when adventure starts.”

— Yvon Chouinard

14. “Profit is what happens when you do everything else right.”

— Yvon Chouinard

15. “Real adventure is defined best as a journey from which you may not come back alive, and certainly not as the same person.”

— Yvon Chouinard

Featured in: Real Quotes

16. “Everything we make pollutes. The most responsible thing we can do is to make each product as well as we know how so it lasts as long as possible.”

— Yvon Chouinard

17. “The more you know, the less you need.”

— Yvon Chouinard

18. “There’s a movement for simplifying your life: purchase less stuff, own a few things that are very high quality that last a long time, and that are multifunctional.”

— Yvon Chouinard

19. “The whole purpose of an adventure is to gain some spiritual or emotional insight. When you compromise the process, you compromise the gain.”

— Yvon Chouinard

Featured in: Adventure Quotes

20. “Hiring people with diverse backgrounds brings in a flexibility of thought and openness to new ways of doing things, as opposed to hiring clones from business schools who have been taught a codified way of doing business.”

— Yvon Chouinard

21. “Evil doesn’t have to be an overt act; it can be merely the absence of good. If you have the ability, the resources, and the opportunity to do good and you do nothing, that can be evil.”

— Yvon Chouinard

22. “My favorite quote about entrepreneurship is that to understand an entrepreneur, you should study a juvenile delinquent. They’re both saying: “This sucks and I’m going to do it another way.” You have to want to break the rules and prove that your way works.”

— Yvon Chouinard

23. “We’re a part of nature. As we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves. It’s a selfish thing to want to protect nature.”

— Yvon Chouinard

24. “Surfing and climbing are both useless sports. You get to be conquistadors of the useless. You climb to the summit and there is nothing there. And you could hike to the top from another direction. How you get there is the important part. It’s the same with surfing.”

— Yvon Chouinard

25. “If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, ‘This sucks, I’m going to do my own thing.’”

— Yvon Chouinard

26. “You have a whole life in the outdoors, you realize you have a sense of responsibility to protect these wild places.”

— Yvon Chouinard

27. “Who are businesses really responsible to? Their customers? Shareholders? Employees? We would argue that it’s none of the above. Fundamentally, businesses are responsible to their resource base. Without a healthy environment there are no shareholders, no employees, no customers and no business.”

— Yvon Chouinard

28. “No young kid growing up dreams of someday becoming a businessman. He wants to be a fireman, a sponsored athlete or a forest ranger The Lee Iacoccas, Donald Trumps, and Jack Welchs of the business world are heroes to no one except other businessmen with similar values.”

— Yvon Chouinard

29. “It’s okay to be eccentric if you’re rich; otherwise you’re just crazy.”

— Yvon Chouinard

30. “The goal of climbing big, dangerous mountains should be to attain some sort of spiritual and personal growth, but this won’t happen if you compromise away the entire process.”

— Yvon Chouinard

Featured in: Personal Growth Quotes

31. “I purposely try to hire people who are really self-motivated and good at what they do, and then I just leave them alone.”

— Yvon Chouinard

32. “Traveling is my form of self-education. Every stream I fish now is not as good as it used to be. Traveling is my form of self-education. Every stream I fish now is not as good as it used to be. If you keep your eyes open as you travel around, you realize we are destroying this planet.”

— Yvon Chouinard

33. “Mainly, my job is to be on the outside and bring ideas into the company and forge change. Most people hate change – it’s threatening. I thrive on it.”

— Yvon Chouinard

34. “Yeah, leading an examined life, I always say, is a pain in the ass. It adds an element of complexity to business that most businessmen don’t want to hear about. They just want to call a fabric manufacturer, and say, “Hey, give us 10,000 yards of shirting.””

— Yvon Chouinard

35. “Most of the damage we cause to the planet is the result of our own ignorance.”

— Yvon Chouinard

36. “I don’t really believe that humans are evil; it is just that we are not very intelligent animals. No animal is so stupid as to foul its only nest, except humans.”

— Yvon Chouinard

37. “Once you educate yourself, you’re left with choices.”

— Yvon Chouinard

38. “I think risk is important. I don’t care if it’s a great financial risk or a physical risk. You only get out of something what you put into it and the fact that you are willing to risk something means that you are going to get a lot more out of it.”

— Yvon Chouinard

39. “Traveling is my form of self-education.”

— Yvon Chouinard

40. “Why is a worm so effective? Because it is always moving.”

— Yvon Chouinard

41. “The solution may be for a lot of the world’s problems is to turn around and take a forward step. You can’t just keep trying to make a flawed system work.”

— Yvon Chouinard

42. “We choose to believe that the granite is alive. If life is movement, then rock – with its atoms flying around like stars in cosmos – is alive.”

— Yvon Chouinard

43. “You have to remember this was the ’60s, when climbing was dangerous and sex was safe.”

— Yvon Chouinard

44. “I’ve accepted the fact that there’s a beginning and end to everything. All species are born, evolve, and then die off. We’re going through the 6th great extinction and the large mammals are going first and, you know what – we’re large mammals!”

— Yvon Chouinard

45. “If you focus on the process of climbing, you’ll end up on the summit.”

— Yvon Chouinard

46. “The future of Yosemite climbing lies not in Yosemite, but in using the new techniques in the great granite ranges of the world.”

— Yvon Chouinard

47. “One thing I did not want to change, even if we got serious, work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two at a time.”

— Yvon Chouinard

48. “Again, like the Zen approach to archery or anything else, you identify the goal and then forget about it and concentrate on the process. Measure.”

— Yvon Chouinard

49. “A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation.”

— Yvon Chouinard

50. “To re-create the entrepreneurial atmosphere of the sort we’d had at Chouinard Equipment, we broke the line into eight categories and hired eight product czars to manage them. Each was responsible for his or her own product development, marketing, inventory, quality control, and coordination with the three sales channels – wholesale, mail order, and retail.”

— Yvon Chouinard