Yvon Chouinard Quotes

The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life; it’s so easy to make it complex.

How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top

Real adventure is defined best as a journey from which you may not come back alive, and certainly not as the same person.

The whole purpose of an adventure is to gain some spiritual or emotional insight. When you compromise the process, you compromise the gain.

It's not an adventure until something goes wrong.

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

If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, ‘This sucks, I’m going to do my own thing.’

To do good, you actually have to do something.

We're a part of nature. As we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves. It's a selfish thing to want to protect nature.

Mastery... is to work toward simplicity; replace complex technology with knowledge, hard work, and skill.

At Patagonia, making a profit is not the goal because the Zen master would say profits happen 'when you do everything else right'.

The solution may be for a lot of the world's problems is to turn around and take a forward step. You can't just keep trying to make a flawed system work.

There's a movement for simplifying your life: purchase less stuff, own a few things that are very high quality that last a long time, and that are multifunctional.

The word adventure has gotten overused. For me, when everything goes wrong - that's when adventure starts

Everything we make pollutes. The most responsible thing we can do is to make each product as well as we know how so it lasts as long as possible.

Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.

The more you know, the less you need.

True adventure begins when everything goes wrong.

Going back to a simpler life based on living by sufficiency rather than excess is not a step backward.

Profit is what happens when you do everything else right.

Going back to a simpler life is not a step backwards.

We took special pride in the fact that climbing rocks and icefalls had no economic value in society...We were like a wild species living in the edges of an ecosystem - adaptable, resilient and tough.

You climb to the summit and there is nothing there.

The goal of climbing big, dangerous mountains should be to attain some sort of spiritual and personal growth, but this won't happen if you compromise away the entire process.

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.

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

The future of Yosemite climbing lies not in Yosemite, but in using the new techniques in the great granite ranges of the world.

We choose to believe that the granite is alive. If life is movement, then rock - with its atoms flying around like stars in cosmos - is alive.

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.

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

Remember: if you take bivouac equipment along, you will bivouac.

The revolution starts at the bottom.

Once you educate yourself, you're left with choices.

One thing I did not want to change, even if we got serious, work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two at a time.

Most of the damage we cause to the planet is the result of our own ignorance.

You have a whole life in the outdoors, you realize you have a sense of responsibility to protect these wild places.

I purposely try to hire people who are really self-motivated and good at what they do, and then I just leave them alone.

Mainly, my job is to be on the outside and bring ideas into the company and forge change. Most people hate change—it’s threatening. I thrive on it.

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

Evil doesn’t have to be an overt act; it can be merely the absence of good. If you have the ability, the resources, and the opportunity to do good and you do nothing, that can be evil.

The more I make the more I can give away.

It's okay to be eccentric if you're rich; otherwise you're just crazy.

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.

Traveling is my form of self-education.

How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top.

…most of the damage we cause to the planet is the result of our own ignorance.

The goal of climbing big, dangerous mountains should be to attain some sort of spiritual and personal growth, but this won’t happen if you compromise away the entire process.

…the worst thing said about him is that he was "uncurious.