Top 87 Quotes & Sayings by Joseph Wood Krutch
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American environmentalist Joseph Wood Krutch.
Last updated on September 18, 2024.
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.
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.
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.
If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.
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.
If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.
Security depends not so much upon how much you have, as upon how much you can do without.
Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.
Both the cockroach and the bird would get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most.
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.
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.
There is no such thing as a dangerous woman; there are only susceptible men.
Few people have ever seriously wished to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional form and ceremonies.
It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder.
What a man knows is everywhere at war with what he wants.
The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.
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.
Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.
We must not judge the society of the future by considering whether or not we should like to live in it; the question is whether those who have grown up in it will be happier than those who have grown up in our society or those of the past.
Poetry, mythology, and religion represent the world as man would like to have it, while science represents the world as he gradually comes to discover it.
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.
Not to have known - as most men have not - either the mountain or the desert is not to have known one's self. Not to have known one's self is to have known no one.
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.
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.
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.
Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man's existence.
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.
The wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.
The most important part of our lives-our sensations, emotions, desires, and aspirations-takes place in a universe of illusions which science can attenuate or destroy, but which it is powerless to enrich.
The flowers never waste their sweetness on the desert air or, for that matter, on the jungle air. In fact, they waste it only when nobody except a human being is there to smell it. It is for the bugs and a few birds, not for men, that they dye their petals or waft their scents.
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.
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.
The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated.
We need some contact with the things we sprang from. We need nature at least as a part of the context of our lives. Without cities we cannot be civilized. Without nature, without wilderness even, we are compelled to renounce an important part of our heritage.
Long before I ever saw the desert I was aware of the mystical overtones which the observation of nature made audible to me. But I have never been more frequently or more vividly aware of them than in connection with the desert phenomena.
The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism, but February.... Spring is too far away to comfort even by anticipation, and winter long ago lost the charm of novelty. This is the very three a.m. of the calendar.
Technology made large populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable.
Man is the only one in whom the instinct of life falters long enough to enable it to ask the question "Why?
As machines get to be more and more like men, men will come to be more like machines.
The mind leaps, and leaps perhaps with a sort of elation, through the immensities of space, but the spirit, frightened and cold, longs to have once more above its head the inverted bowl beyond which may lie whatever paradise its desires may create.
Life is very persistent and very ingenious in seizing every opportunity.
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.
Love is ...not a fact in nature of which we become aware, but rather a creation of the human imagination.
Perhaps we are wiser, less foolish and more far-seeing than we were two hundred years ago. But we are still imperfect in all these things, and since the turn of the century it has been remarked that neither wisdom nor virtue have increased as rapidly as the need for both.
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.
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.
The advertiser is the overrewarded court jester and court pander at the democratic court.
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.
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.
Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.
Whenever man forgets that man is an animal, the result is always to make him less humane.
The human mind can appreciate the One only by seeing it first in the Many.
There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned.
Nature takes no account of even the most reasonable of human excuses.
In the long run our boasted control of nature is a delusion.
A humanist is anyone who rejects the attempt to describe or account for man wholly on the basis of physics, chemistry or animal behaviour.
Happiness is a kind of gratitude and vice versa.
The rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at, but the moment when we are capable of seeing.
Nothing is too great or too good to be true. Do not believe that we can imagine things better than they are. In the long run, in the ultimate outlook, in the eye of the Creator, the possibilities of existence, the possibilities open to us, are beyond our imagination.
In a cat's eye, all things belong to cats.
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