Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes

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

As for this present unhappy time, haunted by ghosts from a dead world and not yet at home in its own, its predicament is not unlike the predicament of the adolescent who has not yet learned to orient himself without reference to the mythology amid which his childhood was passed.

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.

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

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

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.

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

And the thing which is missing is love, some feeling for, as well as some understanding of, the inclusive community of rocks and soils, plants and animals, of which we are a part.

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

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

Man is, perhaps, no more prone to war than he used to be and no more inclined to commit other evil deeds. But a given amount of ill will or folly will go further than it used to.

It is disastrous to own more of anything than you can possess, and it is one of the most fundamental laws of human nature that our power actually to possess is limited.

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.

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

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.

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.

The impulse to mar and to destroy is as ancient and almost as nearly universal as the impulse to create. The one is an easier way than the other of demonstrating power.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Up up and quit your books' is not an adjuration commonly thought advisable in universities but there are occasions -- as for instance, when studying Wordsworth when it might be advisable.

For a real glimpse into an almost vanished world, one should look...at a scorpion who so obviously has no business lingering into the twentieth century. He is not shaped like a spider and he has too many legs to be an insect. Plainly, he is a discontinued model--still running but very difficult, one imagines, to get spare parts for.

Is it wholly fantastic to admit the possibility that Nature herself strove toward what we call beauty? Face to face with any one of the elaborate flowers which man's cultivation has had nothing to do with, it does not seem fantastic to me. We put survival first. But when we have a margin of safety left over, we expend it in the search for the beautiful. Who can say that Nature does not do the same?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 the legends of the saints and the prophets, either a desert or a mountain is pretty sure to figure. It is usually in the middle of one or on the top of the other that the vision comes or the test is met. To give their message to the world they come down or come out, but it is almost invariably in a solitude, either high or dry, that it is first revealed.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

August creates as she slumbers, replete and satisfied.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

There are some optimists who search eagerly for the skunk cabbage which in February sometimes pushes itself up through the ice, and who call it a sign of spring. I wish that I could feel that way about it, but I do not. The truth of the matter, to me, is simply that skunk cabbage blooms in the winter time.

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