Top 90 Quotes & Sayings by Yvon Chouinard

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

True adventure begins when everything goes wrong.

Doing risk sports 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. The same is true for a business. The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to ‘have it all,’ the sooner it will die.

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

The revolution starts at the bottom.

There's no difference between a pessimist who says, "Oh it's hopeless, so don't bother doing anything." and an optimist who says, "Don't bother doing anything, it's going to turn out fine anyways. Either way, nothing happens."

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

...there's no such thing as sustainability. There are just levels of it. It's a process, not a real goal. All you can do is work toward it. There's no such thing as any sustainable economy. The only thing I know that's even close to sustainable economic activity would be organic farming on a very small scale or hunting and gathering on a very small scale. And manufacturing, you end up with way more waste than you end up with finished product. It's totally unsustainable. It's just the way it is.

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.

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

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

We grow by letting the customer tell us. So when the customer tells us that they're frustrated, that they just got their catalogue and we're already out of a product they wanted, then it tells me that we're not making enough. We let the customer tell us instead of creating an artificial demand for our products. Any time you're making products that people don't need, you're at the mercy of the economy, you're at the mercy of whatever is going on. So we tried to avoid that situation.

...it's the same with business. If you focus on the goal and not the process, you inevitably compromise. Businessmen who focus on profits wind up in the hole. For me, profit is what happens when you do everything else right.

Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.

Nature doesn't like empires. It doesn't like accumulation in one place, it doesn't like monoculture. It's always trying to make diverse species. It wants to spread everything out. And we're constantly trying to hold everything in.

No young kid growing up dreams of someday becoming a businessman. He wants to be a fireman, a sponsored athlete or a forest ranger The Lee Iacoccas, Donald Trumps, and Jack Welchs of the business world are heroes to no one except other businessmen with similar values.

What they don't realize is that I'm not in the business to make clothes. I'm not in the business to make more money for myself, for Christ's sake. This is the reason Patagonia exists - to put into action the recommendations I read about in books to avoid environmental collapse. That's the reason I'm in business - to try to clean up our own act, and try to influence other companies to do the right thing, and try to influence our customers to do the right thing. So we're not going to change.

Surfing and climbing are both useless sports. You get to be conquistadors of the useless. You climb to the summit and there is nothing there. And you could hike to the top from another direction. How you get there is the important part. It's the same with surfing.

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.

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

Who are businesses really responsible to? Their customers? Shareholders? Employees? We would argue that it’s none of the above. Fundamentally, businesses are responsible to their resource base. Without a healthy environment there are no shareholders, no employees, no customers and no business.

To do good, you actually have to do something.

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

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.

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.’

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

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.

You have to remember this was the '60s, when climbing was dangerous and sex was safe.

Hiring people with diverse backgrounds brings in a flexibility of thought and openness to new ways of doing things, as opposed to hiring clones from business schools who have been taught a codified way of doing business.

I think risk is important. I don't care if it's a great financial risk or a physical risk. You only get out of something what you put into it and the fact that you are willing to risk something means that you are going to get a lot more out of it.

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

...it's always been difficult for us to lead an examined life as a corporation. I've always felt like a company has the responsibility to not wait for the government to tell it what to do, or to wait for the consumer to tell it what to do, but as soon as it finds out it's doing something wrong, stop doing it.

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

I took a dozen of our top managers to Argentina, to the windswept mountains of the real Patagonia, for a walkabout. In the course of roaming around those wild lands, we asked ourselves why we were in business and what kind of business we wanted Patagonia to be. A billion-dollar company? Okay, but not if it meant we had to make products we couldn't be proud of. And we discussed what we could do to help stem the environmental harm we caused as a company. We talked about the values we had in common, and the shared culture that had brought everyone to Patagonia, Inc., and not another company.

When I die and go to hell, the devil is going to make me the marketing director for a cola company. I’ll be in charge of trying to sell a product that no one needs, is identical to its competition, and can’t be sold on its merits. I’d be competing head-on in the cola wars, on price, distribution, advertising, and promotion, which would indeed be hell for me. Remember, I’m the kid who couldn’t play competitive games. I’d much rather design and sell products so good and unique that they have no competition.

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

So all of these companies that are going for the big growth, if it continues for any length of time, will outlast their resources and outlast their customers and go belly-up. And that's why these huge companies have massive layoffs all the time.

Profit is what happens when you do everything else right.

It's not an adventure until something goes wrong.

The secret to happiness is to be working at your passion. If you want to be miserable, lead a desperate life like everybody else where they drag their asses to work everyday because they hate their job.

We're not citizens anymore. We're consumers. That's what we're called. It's just like being an alcoholic and being in denial that you're an alcoholic. We're in denial that each and every one of us is the problem. And until we face up to that, nothing's going to happen.

Hire extremely independent, intelligent, and passionate people, not necessarily "experts." Maybe three or four of my employees have MBAs, and those guys aren't necessarily at the top of the food chain.

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.

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.

I drive old cars, all my Patagonia clothes are years and years old, I hardly have anything new. I try to lead a very simple life. I am not a consumer of anything. And I much prefer sleeping on somebody's floor than in a motel room.

The more you know, the less you need.

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.

I've accepted the fact that there's a beginning and end to everything. All species are born, evolve, and then die off. We're going through the 6th great extinction and the large mammals are going first and, you know what - we're large mammals!

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

Going back to a simpler life based on living by sufficiency rather than excess is not a step backward. Rather, returning to a simpler way allows us to regain our dignity, puts us in touch with the land, and makes us value human contact again.

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.

There is a beginning and end to all life - and to all human endeavors. Species evolve and die off. Empires rise, then break apart. Businesses grow, then fold. There are no exceptions. I'm OK with all that. Yet it pains me to bear witness to the sixth great extinction, where we humans are directly responsible for the extirpation of so many wonderful creatures and invaluable indigenous cultures. It saddens me to observe the plight of our own species; we appear to be incapable of solving our problems.

The rules of the game must be constantly updated to keep up with the expanding technology. Otherwise we overkill the classic climbs and delude ourselves into thinking we are better climbers than the pioneers.