Top 80 Yvon Chouinard Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Remember: if you take bivouac equipment along, you will bivouac...”

— Yvon Chouinard

52. “The secret to happiness is to be working at your passion. If you want to be miserable, lead a desperate life like everybody else where they drag their asses to work everyday because they hate their job.”

— Yvon Chouinard

53. “You climb to the summit and there is nothing there...”

— Yvon Chouinard

54. “Hire extremely independent, intelligent, and passionate people, not necessarily “experts.” Maybe three or four of my employees have MBAs, and those guys aren’t necessarily at the top of the food chain.”

— Yvon Chouinard

55. “We’re not citizens anymore. We’re consumers. That’s what we’re called. It’s just like being an alcoholic and being in denial that you’re an alcoholic. We’re in denial that each and every one of us is the problem. And until we face up to that, nothing’s going to happen.”

— Yvon Chouinard

56. “Nature doesn’t like empires. It doesn’t like accumulation in one place, it doesn’t like monoculture. It’s always trying to make diverse species. It wants to spread everything out. And we’re constantly trying to hold everything in.”

— Yvon Chouinard

57. “I wanted to distance myself from those pasty faced corpses in suits I saw in airline magazine ads. If I was going to become a businessman, I was going to do it on my own terms.”

— Yvon Chouinard

58. “Reusing something instead of immediately discarding it, when done for the right reasons, can be an act of love which expresses our own dignity. –.”

— Yvon Chouinard

59. “I believe the accepted model of capitalism that demands endless growth deserves the blame for the destruction of nature, and it should be displaced. Failing that, I try to work with those companies and help them change the way they think about our resources.”

— Yvon Chouinard

60. “The reason it was so scary was that there was only one climber capable of rescuing us, and that was Layton Kor, and he was in Colorado.”

— Yvon Chouinard

61. “But I’m really trying to run this company like it is going to be here a hundred years from now. That’s what’s important.”

— Yvon Chouinard

62. “In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness. Studying.”

— Yvon Chouinard

63. “The rules of the game must be constantly updated to keep up with the expanding technology. Otherwise we overkill the classic climbs and delude ourselves into thinking we are better climbers than the pioneers.”

— Yvon Chouinard

64. “A real capitalist knows that $10 given today does a lot more good than $100 given 10 years from now.”

— Yvon Chouinard

65. “The most important thing is to get the fish in quickly and leave it in the water. Forget the hero pose.”

— Yvon Chouinard

66. “So all of these companies that are going for the big growth, if it continues for any length of time, will outlast their resources and outlast their customers and go belly-up. And that’s why these huge companies have massive layoffs all the time.”

— Yvon Chouinard

67. “The climbing as a whole is not very esthetic or enjoyable; it is merely difficult.”

— Yvon Chouinard

68. “I’m the company philosopher and the burr in the saddle. I’m the one who says we need to try harder, improve the quality of our products, become a part of the political process, help elect people who are good for the environment.”

— Yvon Chouinard

69. “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

70. “Is climbing, as a passion and as a sport, better off now than it was in the past? We can do harder climbs now in faster times – techniques are more refined and equipement more sophisticated – but are we really any better off?”

— Yvon Chouinard

71. “What we take, how and what we make, what we waste, is in fact a question of ethics.”

— Yvon Chouinard

72. “Good design is as little design as possible.”

— Yvon Chouinard

73. “Once you lose the discipline of functionality as a design guidepost, the imagination runs amok.”

— Yvon Chouinard

74. “The more I make the more I can give away.”

— Yvon Chouinard

75. “Everything we personally own that’s made, sold, shipped, stored, cleaned, and ultimately thrown away does some environmental harm every step of the way, harm that we’re either directly responsible for or is done on our behalf.”

— Yvon Chouinard

76. “Uncurious people do not lead examined lives; they cannot see causes that lie deeper than the surface.”

— Yvon Chouinard

77. “Doing risk sport had taught me another important lesson: never exceed your limits. You push the envelope and you live for those moments when you’re right on the edge, but you don’t go over. You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means.”

— Yvon Chouinard

78. “You ask me about the past, you ask me about the future, the only way to be happy is to be living right now.”

— Yvon Chouinard

79. “During the sixties, all the risk-type sports were very popular, because everybody was rebelling against their parents, or rebelling against the whole system. But those days are over. This is the day of conservatism.”

— Yvon Chouinard

80. “There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, ‘It’s all over, don’t bother trying to do anything, forget about voting, it won’t make a difference,’ and an optimist who says, ‘Relax, everything is going to turn out fine.’ Either way the results are the same. Nothing gets done.”

— Yvon Chouinard

81. “Patagonia’s image is a human voice. It expresses the joy of people who love the world, who are passionate about their beliefs, and who want to influence the future. It is not processed; it won’t compromise its humanity. This means that it will offend, and it will inspire.”

— Yvon Chouinard

82. “It was also clear that in order to survive at this game, we had to get serious.”

— Yvon Chouinard

83. “Even if he or she isn’t aware of it, every individual spends an entire lifetime creating and evolving a personal image that others perceive.”

— Yvon Chouinard

84. “But you are what you do, not what you say you are.”

— Yvon Chouinard

85. “Function must dictate form.”

— Yvon Chouinard

86. “You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means.”

— Yvon Chouinard

87. “Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis.”

— Yvon Chouinard