43+ Peter Matthiessen Quotes On Education, Nature And Order

Peter Matthiessen was an American novelist, naturalist, and environmental activist. He was a two-time National Book Award winner, and his works of non-fiction include The Snow Leopard and The Cloud Forest. He was also an accomplished fiction writer, with works such as At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Peter Matthiessen on education, nature, life.

Top 10 Peter Matthiessen Quotes

1. I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.
2. Anyone who thinks they can save the world is both wrong and dangerous
3. Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn't that wonderful?
4. Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?
5. Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being.
6. You do your best work when you're not conscious of yourself.
7. When I'm in the field, when I'm working, I keep very careful notes. I wear big shirts with big breast pockets, and I carry in them two little spiral notebooks.
8. In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth.
9. Illuminated by the same joyful curiosity and erudition, lyric writing, and plain love of life that made a classic of Archie Carr's The Windward Road.
10. It is said in Java that the tiger's hearing is so acute that hunters must keep their nose hairs cut lest the tiger hear the breath whistle through their nostrils.

Peter Matthiessen Short Quotes

• In zazen, one is one's present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once.
• I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail.
• If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us.
• Be light, light, light - full of light!
• My eye is fixed not on the ending of the book but on the feeling of that ending.
• In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.
• The purpose of our life is to help others through it.
• This world is painted on a wild dark metal
• Simultaneously I am myself, the child I was, the old man I will be.

Peter Matthiessen Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

In fiction, you have a rough idea what's coming up next - sometimes you even make a little outline - but in fact you don't know. Each day is a whole new - and for me, a very invigorating - experience. — Peter Matthiessen

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

Where to begin? Do we measure the relaxing of the feet? The moment when the eye glimpses the hawk, when instinct functions? For in this pure action, this pure moving of the bird, there is no time, no space, but only the free doing-being of this very moment -now! — Peter Matthiessen

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

It's a simplification to say that the men [during Stone Age] went to war to maintain their dominance over the women. The men would help dig agricultural ditches because they were superb farmers. That was very heavy lifting work. But then they just preened themselves, and put bird-of-paradise plumes [in their hair], and smoked dope. — Peter Matthiessen

How could I say that I wished to penetrate the secrets of the mountains in search of something still unknown that, like the yeti, might well be missed for the very fact of searching? — Peter Matthiessen

The Zen expression “Kill the Buddha!” means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself. — Peter Matthiessen

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

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

I have never figured out how women work but I do know that their skin color has no significance. Black or white, every last one is pretty pink on the inside and they are all impossible. — Peter Matthiessen

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

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

Alec Wilkinson is a spare, clear, and lucid writer who works in stylistic simplicity with material that is not simple at all. — Peter Matthiessen

It is related that Sakyamuni [the historical Buddha] once dismissed as of small consequence a feat of levitation on the part of a disciple, and cried out in pity for a yogin by the river who had spent twenty years of his human existence learning to walk on water, when the ferryman might have taken him across for a small coin. — Peter Matthiessen

I like to hear and smell the countryside, the land that my characters inhabit. I don’t want these characters to step off the page, I want them to step out of the landscape. — Peter Matthiessen

I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes. — Peter Matthiessen

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

The sun is roaring, it fills to bursting each crystal of snow. I flush with feeling, moved beyond my comprehension, and once again, the warm tears freeze upon my face. These rocks and mountains, all this matter, the snow itself, the air- the earth is ringing. All is moving, full of power, full of light. — Peter Matthiessen

Figures dark beneath their loads pass down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by the streak of sunset upon their shoulders — Peter Matthiessen

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 Lessons by Peter Matthiessen

1. Peter Matthiessen's work emphasizes the importance of paying attention to the natural world and understanding our connection to the environment.
2. His writing also emphasizes the need for understanding and empathy for other cultures and beliefs.
3. Finally, Matthiessen's work encourages readers to be mindful of their own actions and how they affect the world around them.