Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent working over drafts and blue-prints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?

It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of the human breast or shoulder, there must be experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. 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.

I have a different definition of evil from most people. 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.

When a government is breaking or refusing to enforce its own laws, then I believe civil disobedience is the rightful course of action.

In fact a typical cotton product labeled 100 percent cotton is on average only 73 percent cotton; all the rest is resins, plasticizers, and chemicals added in the finishing process.

I don’t really believe that humans are evil; it’s just that we are not very intelligent animals.

I’m pessimistic because I see no will in society to do enough about the impending doom. Yet 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.

When there is no crisis, the wise leader or CEO will invent one. Not by crying wolf but by challenging the employees with change.

When there’s a problem of any kind, these people have the confidence to think it through and solve it themselves instead of looking for a “repairman.” The longevity of a CEO’s career is directly proportional to his problem-solving skills and ability to adapt and grow with the job.

The fact that Patagonia has had six CEOs in its thirty years can be regarded as a failure to find and keep the right person (or as the failure of Patagonia’s two hardheaded owners to relinquish power). Looking back, I see that each person brought with him a diverse set of skills that have been valuable to the company, whether he came from a background of retail, finance, biology, ex-Seal team, or education.

What do the kids think? I walked into our child care building one day and asked some of the four-and five-year-olds, “Hi, kids! How’s school?” One young guy immediately corrected me. “We’re not in school, we’re at work. My mother works over there, and I work here.” What a difference that is from your average kid whose father or mother disappears every day for eight hours or more and who thus grows up with no concept of work. It’s no wonder every young kid dreams of being “sponsored” by a big corporation like Oakley or Nike, as if this were what work is all about.

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. —FRANÇOIS AUGUSTE RENÉ CHATEAUBRIAND

We want to be the best company, and it’s easier to try to be the best small company than the best big company.

It’s okay to be eccentric, as long as you are rich; otherwise you’re just crazy.

If you were to tell a parent that the local drinking water is unsafe for their children, you’d spark immediate outrage. But tell the same person that cancer clusters show up inexplicably in long-term studies of children who live in their pesticide-intensive farming community, and the response is less pronounced.

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. A company too creates and evolves an image that can stem from its reason to be in business, can grow out of its actions, or perhaps is assembled from pieces by the creative mind of an advertising person. A company’s (and a person’s) image can be very different from their self-image.

In particular, we found that the postsale care of a clothing product caused as much as four times the amount of harm as the entire manufacturing process.

Someone once said that the poor can’t afford to buy cheap goods. You can buy a cheap blender that will burn out the first time you try to grind some ice cubes, or you can wait until you can afford a quality one that will last. Ironically, the longer you wait, the less you may have to spend; at my age, it’s becoming easier to buy only products that will “last a lifetime.”

We begin with the premise that all life on Earth is facing a critical time, during which survivability will be the issue that increasingly dominates public concern. Where survivability is not the issue, the quality of human experience of life may be, as well as the decline in health of the natural world as reflected in the loss of biodiversity, cultural diversity, and the planet’s life support systems. The root causes of this situation include basic values embodied in our economic system, including the values of the corporate world. Primary among the problematic corporate values are the primacy of expansion and short-term profit over such other considerations as quality, sustainability, environmental and human health, and successful communities.

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 and degree of specialization that doesn’t appeal to me. Once I reach that 80 percent level I like to go off and do something totally different; that probably explains the diversity of the Patagonia product line—and why our versatile, multifaceted clothes are the most successful.

I didn’t buy a tent until I was almost forty, preferring to sleep under boulders and under the low-hanging branches of an alpine fir.

Developing a natural immunity to the turistas and giardia is not an easy passage, but if you refuse to take Flagyl and antibiotics and don’t drink iodine-treated or chlorinated water, the immunity gradually happens.