Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes

Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.

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

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.

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

Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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