Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes
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.
The grand paradox of our society is this: we magnify man’s right but we minimize his capacities.
Rhetoric takes no real account of the art in literature and morality takes no account of the art in life.
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.
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.
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.
To be reminded that one is very much like other members of the animal kingdom is often funny...though...I do not too much mind being somewhat like a cat.
Every time a value is born, existence takes on a new meaning; every time one dies, some part of that meaning passes away.
Nature, in her blind thirst for life has filled every possible cranny of the rotting earth with some sort of fantastic creature.
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?
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.
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.
There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned.
Love is ...not a fact in nature of which we become aware, but rather a creation of the human imagination.
Man is the only one in whom the instinct of life falters long enough to enable it to ask the question "Why?
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.
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.
Security depends not so much upon how much you have as upon how much you can do without.
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.
When a man wantonly destroys a work of man we call him a vandal when a man destroys one of the works of God we call him a sportsman.
Civilizations die from philosophical calm irony and the sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.
Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are a subject to a good many different ailments, but I have never heard of one who has suffered from insomnia.
