Let My People Go Surfing Quotes

“The more you know, the less you need.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“Real adventure is defined best as a journey from which you may not come back alive, and certainly not as the same person.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“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.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“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.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“the worst thing said about him is that he was "uncurious.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“I've always thought of myself as an 80 percenter. I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about an 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession that doesn't appeal to me. Once I reach 80 percent level I like to go off and do something totally different; that probably explains the diversity of the Patagonia product like - and why our versatile, multifaceted clothes are the most successful.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“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.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“It's okay to be eccentric if you're rich; otherwise you're just crazy.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“…most of the damage we cause to the planet is the result of our own ignorance.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“At Patagonia, making a profit is not the goal because the Zen master would say profits happen 'when you do everything else right'.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“Everything we personally own that’s made, sold, shipped, stored, cleaned, and ultimately thrown away does some environmental harm every step of the way, harm that we’re either directly responsible for or is done on our behalf.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“Doing risk sport had taught me another important lesson: never exceed your limits. You push the envelope and you live for those moments when you’re right on the edge, but you don’t go over. You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“There's no difference between a pessimist who says, 'It's all over, don't bother trying to do anything, forget about voting, it won't make a difference,' and an optimist who says, 'Relax, everything is going to turn out fine.' Either way the results are the same. Nothing gets done.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“I don't really believe that humans are evil; it is just that we are not very intelligent animals. No animal is so stupid as to foul its only nest, except humans.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“We are the last generation that can experience true wilderness. Already the world has shrunk dramatically. To a Frenchman, the Pyrenees are “wild.” To a kid living in a New York City ghetto, Central Park is “wilderness,” the way Griffith Park in Burbank was to me when I was a kid. Even travelers in Patagonia forget that its giant, wild-looking estancias are really just overgrazed sheep farms. New Zealand and Scotland were once forested and populated with long-forgotten animals. The place in the lower forty-eight states that is farthest away from a road or habitation is at the headwaters of the Snake River in Wyoming, and it’s still only twenty-five miles. So if you define wilderness as a place that is more than a day’s walk from civilization, there is no true wilderness left in North America, except in parts of Alaska and Canada. In a true Earth-radical group, concern for wilderness preservation must be the keystone. The idea of wilderness, after all, is the most radical in human thought—more radical than Paine, than Marx, than Mao. Wilderness says: Human beings are not paramount, Earth is not for Homo sapiens alone, human life is but one life form on the planet and has no right to take exclusive possession. Yes, wilderness for its own sake, without any need to justify it for human benefit. Wilderness for wilderness. For bears and whales and titmice and rattlesnakes and stink bugs. And…wilderness for human beings…. Because it is home. —Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior We need to protect these areas of unaltered wildness and diversity to have a baseline, so we never forget what the real world is like—in perfect balance, the way nature intended the earth to be. This is the model we need to keep in mind on our way toward sustainability.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“We want customers who need our clothing, not just desire it.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“Good design is as little design as possible.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“Uncurious people do not lead examined lives; they cannot see causes that lie deeper than the surface.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“Reusing something instead of immediately discarding it, when done for the right reasons, can be an act of love which expresses our own dignity. —”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual

“What we take, how and what we make, what we waste, is in fact a question of ethics.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“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”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual

“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”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual

“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.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“If you focus on the process of climbing, you’ll end up on the summit.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“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”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual

“use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual

“But you are what you do, not what you say you are.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual

“Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“After we had pondered our responsibilities and financial liabilities, one day it dawned on me that I was a businessman and would probably be one for a long time. It was also clear that in order to survive at this game, we had to get serious. I also knew that I would never be happy playing by the normal rules of business; I wanted to distance myself as far as possible from those pasty-faced corpses in suits I saw in airline magazine ads. If I had to be a businessman, I was going to do it on my own terms. One”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman