Best 78 quotes of Joseph Wood Krutch on MyQuotes

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

A tragic writer does not have to believe in God, but he must believe in man.

August creates as she slumbers, replete and satisfied.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Happiness is a kind of gratitude and vice versa.

Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

In history as it comes to be written, there is usually some Spirit of the Age which historians can define, but the shape of things is seldom so clear to those who live them. To most thoughtful men it has generally seemed that theirs was an Age of Confusion.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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