Edward Abbey quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Edward Abbey

Edward Abbey Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Edward Abbey on Wise Famous Quotes.

So I lived alone.
The first thing I did was take off my pants. Naturally.

Nearly all of Latin America, from Chile to Mexico, is one long rack of torture. Financed, equipped, and refined by the U.S. government.

You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.

Everyone should learn a manual trade: It's never too late to become an honest person.

It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.

If there's anything I hate, it's the vibraphone. And the cha-cha-cha. And Latin rhythms generally.

Gaze not too long into the abyss, lest the abyss gaze into thee.

If I had been as capable of trust as I am susceptible to fear I might have learned something new or some truth so very old we have all forgotten it.

But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.

For this world that men have made, none of us is bad enough. For the world that made us, none is good enough.

As Mark Twain said, 'I love Wagner
if only they'd cut out all that damned singing!'

Great art is never perfect; perfect art is never great.

The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe
fear and awe of the State.

I have been a lucky man. But someone has to be.

It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave.

And if the computer gives you any back talk, pour some well-sugared office coffee into its evil little silicon brain.

Wordless, it rises and falls in hemidemisemitones of unearthly misery. The dirge of the damned

You can't belay a man who's falling in love.

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.

Home is where, when you have to go there, you probably shouldn't.

The great question of life is not the question of death but the question of life. Fear of death shames us all.

We spend more time working for our labor-saving machines than they do working for us.

The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.

Is the Archbishop's blessing any more meaningful than the Politician's handshake? The come, they go, with bigger things than us on their minds.

Lake Powell: storage pond, silt trap, evaporation tank and garbage dispose-all, a 180-mile-long incipient sewage lagoon.

The night I filled an inside straight: Even a blind hog's gonna root up an acorn once in a while.

It is the difference between men and women, not the sameness, that creates the tension and the delight.

For women, the sexual act is a means to a higher end. For a man, it is an end in itself.

A life without tragedy would not be worth living. We

To die alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird, seems to me very good fortune indeed.

Nobody has so many friends that he can afford to lose one.

My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.

Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?

Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.

The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience.

James Joyce buried himself in his great work. _Finnegan's Wake_ is his monument and his tombstone. A dead end.

Civilization flows; culture thickens and coagulates, like tired, sick, stifled blood.

Only a fool is astonished by the foolishness of mankind.

Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.

Say what you like about my bloody murderous government,' I says, 'but don't insult me poor bleedin' country.

Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.

It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written.

Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity: the itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things.

In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.

When a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country's river and streams that country is no longer fit to live in.

I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth.

We should restore the practice of dueling. It might improve manners around here.

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Girls, like flowers, bloom but once. But once is enough.

The New Age orgy: The flesh was willing but the spirit's weak.

Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.

As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.

I've got a crooked elbow and I generally say my prayers with one leg on a brass rail.

God is a sound people make when they're too tired to think anymore.

Epitaphs for a gravestone: 'Please: no hooliganism'; or 'Es prohibe se hace agua aqui'; or 'No comment'.

There are circumstances in which suicide presents a viable option; a workable alternative; the only sensible solution.

Every man has two vocations: his own and philosophy.

Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.

Little boys love machines; girls adore horses; grown-up men and women like to walk.

Henry James was our master of periphrasis
the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words.

A house built on greed cannot long endure.

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

I wouldn't trade a good horse for the best Rolls-Royce ever made
unless I could trade the Rolls for two good horses.

In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean.

The rich are not very nice. That's why they're rich.

The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations.

I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patrotism.

Scientific method: There's a madness in the method.

Women who love only women may have a good point.

Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried.

A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow.

From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.

Roosters: The cry of the male chicken is the most barbaric yawp in all of nature.

Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront.

I am against all forms of government, including good government.

Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.

The sexual revolution transformed the American West: Now even cowboys can get laid.

One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.

In all of nature, there is no sound more pleasing than that of a hungry animal at its feed. Unless you are the food.

In everything but brains and brawn, women are vastly superior to men. A different race.

The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.

Democracy
rule by the people
sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in America.

I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets
the seventeen who got away.

You long for success? Start at the bottom; dig down.

There is a kind of poetry in simple fact.

The absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it.

When guns are outlawed, only the Government will have guns. The Government - and a few outlaws. If that happens, you can count me among the outlaws.

Simplicity is always a virtue.

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.

You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings.

All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love
and most of all, an audience!

It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.

When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.

All forms of government are pernicious, including good government.

The gurus come from the sickliest nation on earth to tell us how to live. And we pay them for it.

The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live ...

The dog's life is a good life, for a dog.

Man was created to complete the horse.

It's a great country: you can say whatever you like so long as it is strictly true
nobody will ever take you seriously.