Joseph Wood Krutch quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Joseph Wood Krutch

Joseph Wood Krutch Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Joseph Wood Krutch on Wise Famous Quotes.

An abundance of some good things is perfectly compatible with the scarcity of others; that life is everywhere precarious, man everywhere small.

There is no such thing as a dangerous woman; there are only susceptible men.

Nature takes no account of even the most reasonable of human excuses.

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and a sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.

The grand paradox of our society is this:
we magnify man's right but we minimize his capacities.

Technology made large populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable.

When a man despoils a work of art we call him a vandal, when he despoils a work of nature we call him a developer.

Any euphemism ceases to be euphemistic after a time and the true meaning begins to show through. It's a losing game, but we keep on trying.

Love is ... not a fact in nature of which we become aware, but rather a creation of the human imagination.

August creates as she slumbers, replete and satisfied.

As machines get to be more and more like men, men will come to be more like machines.

What a man knows is everywhere at war with what he wants.

Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.

When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal. When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman.

Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man's existence.

The rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at, but the moment when we are capable of seeing.

Rhetoric takes no real account of the art in literature and morality takes no account of the art in life.

It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder.

To have passed through life and never experienced solitude is to have never known oneself. To have never known oneself is to have never known anyone.

To be individually righteous is the first of all duties, come what may to ones self, to one's country, to society, and to civilization itself.

Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.

Custom has furnished the only basis which ethics have ever had.

Both the cockroach and the bird would get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most.

Life is very persistent and very ingenious in seizing every opportunity.

The cockroach and the bird were both here long before we were. Both could.

Nature, in her blind thirst for life has filled every possible cranny of the rotting earth with some sort of fantastic creature.

Security depends not so much upon how much you have, as upon how much you can do without.

A tragic writer does not have to believe in God, but he must believe in man.

The typical American believes that no necessity of the soul is free and that there are precious few, if any, which cannot be bought.

Every time a value is born, existence takes on a new meaning; every time one dies, some part of that meaning passes away.

Though many have tried, no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science, which can do so much, cannot decide what it ought to do.

Only those within whose own consciousness the sun rise and set, the leaves burgeon and wither, can be said to be aware of what living is.

Being the inventor of sex would seem to be a sufficient distinction for a creature just barely large enough to be seen by the naked eye.

The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.

There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned.

Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence.

Man is the only one in whom the instinct of life falters long enough to enable it to ask the question Why?

Though we face the facts of sex we are more reluctant than ever to face the fact of death or the crueler facts of life, either biological or social.

Those whose conscience demands that they defy authority in some ways that involve great consequences must be willing to accept some penalty.

If we are deprived of hope as well as fear, we are compensated by being given an almost endless patience for enduring or simply for waiting.

The wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.

Happiness is a kind of gratitude and vice versa.

How anyone can profess to find animal life interesting and yet take delight in reducing the wonder of any animal to a bloody mass of fur or feathers?

In a cat's eye, all things belong to cats.

The human mind can appreciate the One only by seeing it first in the Many.

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.

Whenever man forgets that man is an animal, the result is always to make him less humane.

A humanist is anyone who rejects the attempt to describe or account for man wholly on the basis of physics, chemistry or animal behaviour.

Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many different ailments, but I have never heard of one who suffered from insomnia.

The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated.

In the long run our boasted control of nature is a delusion.

The advertiser is the overrewarded court jester and court pander at the democratic court.

It is sometimes easier to head an institute for the study of child guidance than it is to turn one brat into a decent human being.