# Quote — Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

> Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.

- Author: [Peter Matthiessen](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-matthiessen.md)
- Book: [The Snow Leopard](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-matthiessen/the-snow-leopard.md)
- Page: 42
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Matthiessen#The_Snow_Leopard_(1978)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-matthiessen/the-snow-leopard/amazingly-we-take

## More from this book

> In another life — this isn’t what I know, but how I feel — these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon — the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the upper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again into the sky.

p. 232 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-matthiessen/the-snow-leopard/in-another-life.md)

> Every moment of life is to be lived calmly, mindfully, as if it were the last, to insure that the most is made of the precious human state — the only one in which enlightenment is possible. 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.

p. 85 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-matthiessen/the-snow-leopard/every-moment-of-life.md)

> The ancient intuition that all matter, all “reality,” is energy, that all phenomena, including time and space, are mere crystallizations of mind, is an idea with which few physicists have quarreled since the theory of relativity first called into question the separate identities of energy and matter. Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form; that matter is insubstantial in origin, a temporary aggregate of the pervasive energy that animates the electron. … The cosmic radiation that is thought to come from the explosion of creation strikes the earth with equal intensity from all directions, which suggests either that the earth is at the center of the universe, as in our innocence we once supposed, or that the known universe has no center. Such an idea holds no terror for mystics; in the mystical vision, the universe, its center, and its origins are simultaneous, all around us, all within us, and all One.

p. 65 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-matthiessen/the-snow-leopard/the-ancient-intuition.md)