Gary Snyder Quotes

There are people today who look to fear to take us out of fear. But I believe that there are many, many more people who would look to love.

It's your purpose to leave the world better than how you found it.

Sadness isn't a natural response.

To make the world a better place, see the world as a better place.

When anyone apologizes to us he has to do it very expertly: otherwise we might easily come to see ourselves as the guilty party and experience unpleasant feelings.

It's unthinkable not to love - you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.

Oh darling, don't be bitter. It's the first instinct of the weak.

It isn't what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it's what we say to ourselves about what happens.

self-pity is better than none.

The message I'm sending to myself - I can't change the world until I change myself first.

It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.

Recognizing that something is wrong is the first step toward changing the world.

Happy people build their inner world; unhappy people blame their outer world.

Either your troubles make you better, or they make you bitter. We must always examine what’s going on in our hearts.

Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large bulky figure has a good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will pa tronize in vain,--which taste cannot tolerate,--which ridicule will seize.

Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.

The nature of bad news affects the teller.

Under the sublime law of progress, the present outgrows the past. The great heart of humanity is heaving with the hopes of a brighter day. All the higher instincts of our nature prophesy its approach; and the best intellects of the race are struggling to turn that prophecy into fulfilment.

Anger is the fruit of rotten roots.

The hardest thing in the world is believing someone can change. It's always easier to go along with the way things are than to admit that you might have been wrong in the first place.

If we would change the world, we must first change people's thoughts.

I believe a radiant, light-filled tomorrow should be normal to the experience of living.

Joy, happiness ... we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections ... to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates.

It's in your hands to make the world a better place.