Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes

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.

August creates as she slumbers, replete and satisfied.

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

Science has always promised two things not necessarily related; an increase first in our powers, second in our happiness or wisdom, and we have come to realize that it is the first and less important of the two promises which it has kept most abundantly.

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.

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.

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

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.

Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.

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.

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

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

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

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.

There is no such thing as a dangerous woman; there are only susceptible men.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned.

The typical American believes that no necessity of the soul is free and that there are precious few, if any, which cannot be bought.

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 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.

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

Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.

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.