Peter Matthiessen Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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 Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn.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

  Life, Beauty, Spiritual

  Peter Matthiessen (1998). “Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982”, p.8, Shambhala Publications

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• The purpose of our life is to help others through it.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Helping Others, Purpose, Life Is

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• Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Simple, Simplicity, Secret

  Peter Matthiessen (2008). “The Snow Leopard”, p.135, Penguin

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• 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

  Feelings, Landscape, Restless

  Peter Matthiessen (2010). “The Tree Where Man Was Born”, p.201, Penguin

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• Zen is really just a reminder to stay alive and to be awake. We tend to daydream all the time, speculating about the future and dwelling on the past. Zen practice is about appreciating your life in this moment. If you are truly aware of five minutes a day, then you are doing pretty well. We are beset by both the future and the past, and there is no reality apart from the here and now.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Past, Reality, Dwelling

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

  Peter Matthiessen

  Spiritual, Teacher, Lying

  Peter Matthiessen (1998). “Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982”, p.88, Shambhala Publications

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• The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoilation of a continent which we once confused with progress.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Confused, Civilization, Progress

  Peter Matthiessen (2000). “The Peter Matthiessen Reader: Nonfiction, 1959-1991”, Vintage

  19 Copy quote

• Simultaneously I am myself, the child I was, the old man I will be.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Children, Men, Old Man

  Peter Matthiessen (2008). “The Snow Leopard”, p.195, Penguin

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• I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange... There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, and ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Inspirational, Motivational, Animal

  Peter Matthiessen (1992). “African Silences”, Vintage

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• The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning," they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Heart, Knowing, Secret

  Peter Matthiessen (2008). “The Snow Leopard”, p.234, Penguin

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

  Peter Matthiessen

  Forever, Live Forever, Doomed

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• In the clearness of this Himalayan air, mountains draw near, and in such splendor, tears come quietly to my eyes and cool on my sunburned cheeks. this is not mere soft-mindedness, nor am I all that silly with the altitude. My head has cleared in these weeks free of intrusions- mail, telephones, people and their needs- and I respond to things spontaneously, without defensive or self-conscious screens. Still, all this feeling is astonishing: not so long ago I could say truthfully that I had not shed a tear in twenty years.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Silly, Eye, Long Ago

  Peter Matthiessen (2008). “The Snow Leopard”, p.138, Penguin

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• You see ... a man like me, a cautious man, has his life all figured out according to a pattern, and then the pattern flies apart. You run around for quite a while trying to repair it, until one day you straighten up again with an armful of broken pieces, and you see that the world has gone on without you and you can never catch up with your old life, and you must begin all over again.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Running, Men, Broken

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• Be light, light, light - full of light!

  Peter Matthiessen

  Light

  Peter Matthiessen (2008). “The Snow Leopard”, p.200, Penguin

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• Anyone who thinks they can save the world is both wrong and dangerous

  Peter Matthiessen

  Thinking, World, Dangerous

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• There's an elegiac quality in watching [American wilderness] go, because it's our own myth, the American frontier, that's deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I've seen, and their kids will see nothing; there's a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Eye, Sadness, Kids

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• You do your best work when you're not conscious of yourself.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Consciousness, Self Conscious, Best Work

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• Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn't that wonderful?

  Peter Matthiessen

  Snow, Leopards, Wonderful

  Peter Matthiessen (2008). “The Snow Leopard”, p.269, Penguin

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• 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

  Children, Past, Ideas

  Peter Matthiessen (1998). “Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982”, p.16, Shambhala Publications

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• 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

  Meditation Practice, Enlightenment, Events

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• 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

  Memories, Past, Light

  Peter Matthiessen (2008). “The Snow Leopard”, p.113, Penguin

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• I ... had what Kierkegaard called 'the sickness of infinitude,' wandering from one path to another with no real recognition that I was embarked upon a search, and scarcely a clue as to what I might be after. I only knew that at the bottom of each breath there was a hollow place that needed to be filled.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Real, Might, Path

  Peter Matthiessen (2008). “The Snow Leopard”, p.69, Penguin

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• 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

  Air, Water, Joy

  Peter Matthiessen (2008). “The Snow Leopard”, p.68, Penguin

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• The mystical perception (which is only "mystical" if reality is limited to what can be measured by the intellect and senses) is remarkably consistent in all ages and all places. All phenomena are processes, connections, all is in flux...have the mind screens knocked away to see there is no real edge to anything, that in the endless interpenetration of the universe, a molecular flow, a cosmic energy shimmers in all stone and steel as well as flesh.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Real, Mind, Perception

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• 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

  Children, Healing, Night

  1978 Of the night sky in Nepal. The Snow Leopard,'Northward, October18'.

  18 Copy quote

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