Quotes from Yvon Chouinard

In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness. Studying

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both. —L. P. Jacks Patagonia's

Even if he or she isn't aware of it, every individual spends an entire lifetime creating and evolving a personal image that others perceive.

If you focus on the process of climbing, you'll end up on the summit.

use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis.

Again, like the Zen approach to archery or anything else, you identify the goal and then forget about it and concentrate on the process. Measure

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I'm kind of like a samurai. They say if you want to be a samurai, you can't be afraid of dying, and as soon as you flinch, you get your head cut off. I'm not afraid of losing this business.

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

Traveling is my form of self-education. Every stream I fish now is not as good as it used to be. Traveling is my form of self-education. Every stream I fish now is not as good as it used to be. If you keep your eyes open as you travel around, you realize we are destroying this planet.

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

I believe the accepted model of capitalism that demands endless growth deserves the blame for the destruction of nature, and it should be displaced. Failing that, I try to work with those companies and help them change the way they think about our resources.

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

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.

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.