Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.

The snow itself is lonely or, if you prefer, self-sufficient. There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Electronic calculators can solve problems which the man who made them cannot solve; but no government-subsidized commission of engineers and physicists could create a worm.

If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.

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.

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.

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

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

Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.

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.

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.

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

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

To those who study her, Nature reveals herself as extraordinarily fertile and ingenious in devising means, but she has no ends which the human mind has been able to discover or comprehend.

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

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

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

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

Two-legged creatures we are supposed to love as we love ourselves. The four-legged, also, can come to seem pretty important. But six legs are too many from the human standpoint.

If only the fit survive and if the fitter they are the longer they survive, then Volvox must have demonstrated its superb fitness more conclusively than any higher animal ever has.

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

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

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

True tragedy may be defined as a dramatic work in which the outward failure of the principal personage is compensated for by the dignity and greatness of his character.

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

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

A book ... unlike a television program, moving picture or any other 'modern means of communication' ... can wait for years, yet be available at any moment when it happens to be needed.

February... Now more than ever one must remind oneself that it is wasteful folly to wish that time would pass, or - as the puritanical old saying used to have it - to kill time until it kills you.

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.

It is not a sentimental, but a grimly literal fact that unless we share this terrestrial globe with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be able to live on it for long.

August creates as she slumbers, replete and satisfied.

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.

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

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

When, in the present world, men behave well, that is no doubt sometimes because they are creatures of habit as well as, sometimes, because they are reasonable.

In our hearts those of us who know anything worth knowing know that in March a new year begins, and if we plan any new leaves, it will be when the rest of Nature is planning them too.

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.