Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

About Gary Snyder

Portrait of Gary Snyder

Gary Sherman Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poetry has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance and he has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology".

More quotations from Gary Snyder

For several centuries Western civilization has had a drive for material accumulation, continual extensions of economic power, termed "progress.". . . The longing for growth is not wrong. The nub of the problem is how to flip over, as in jujitsu, the magnificent growth energy of modern civilization into a nonacquisitive search for deeper knowledge of self and nature.

It has always been part of basic human experience to live in a culture of wilderness. There has been no wilderness without some kind of human presence for several hundred thousand years. Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.

humanity perception experience nature

Find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there.

responsibility work

More quotations tagged with “home”

I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home.

—Robert Orben

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.

—John le Carre

solitude perspective world home travel aloneness

If you lived in your heart, you'd be home by now.

A certain businessman, renowned for his ruthlessness, once made a vow in Mark Twain's presence. "Before I die," he declared, "I mean to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I will climb Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments aloud at the top." "I have a better idea," Twain replied. "You could stay home in Boston and keep them.

—Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes

business home travel

To explain why we become attached to our birthplaces, we pretend that we are trees and speak of "roots." Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.

—Salman Rushdie

myth home conservative place roots