1.
Both the cockroach and the bird would get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most.
Joseph Wood Krutch
2.
In a cat's eye, all things belong to cats.
Joseph Wood Krutch
3.
Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.
Joseph Wood Krutch
4.
The advertiser is the overrewarded court jester and court pander at the democratic court.
Joseph Wood Krutch
5.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
6.
Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.
Joseph Wood Krutch
7.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
8.
It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder.
Joseph Wood Krutch
9.
If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.
Joseph Wood Krutch
10.
Technology made large populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable.
Joseph Wood Krutch
11.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
12.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
13.
The wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.
Joseph Wood Krutch
14.
When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal. When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman.
Joseph Wood Krutch
15.
If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.
Joseph Wood Krutch
16.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
17.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
18.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
19.
Whenever man forgets that man is an animal, the result is always to make him less humane.
Joseph Wood Krutch
20.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
21.
Those whose conscience demands that they defy authority in some ways that involve great consequences must be willing to accept some penalty.
Joseph Wood Krutch
22.
Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.
Joseph Wood Krutch
23.
Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man's existence.
Joseph Wood Krutch
24.
The rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at, but the moment when we are capable of seeing.
Joseph Wood Krutch
25.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
26.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
27.
Nature takes no account of even the most reasonable of human excuses.
Joseph Wood Krutch
28.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
29.
As machines get to be more and more like men, men will come to be more like machines.
Joseph Wood Krutch
30.
Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and a sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.
Joseph Wood Krutch
31.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
32.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
33.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
34.
The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated.
Joseph Wood Krutch
35.
Security depends not so much upon how much you have, as upon how much you can do without.
Joseph Wood Krutch
36.
There is no such thing as a dangerous woman; there are only susceptible men.
Joseph Wood Krutch
37.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
38.
The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.
Joseph Wood Krutch
39.
An abundance of some good things is perfectly compatible with the scarcity of others; that life is everywhere precarious, man everywhere small.
Joseph Wood Krutch
40.
Life is very persistent and very ingenious in seizing every opportunity.
Joseph Wood Krutch
41.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
42.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
43.
True tragedy may be defined as a dramatic work in which the outward failure of the principal personage is compensated for by the dignity and greatness of his character.
Joseph Wood Krutch
44.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
45.
The cockroach and the bird were both here long before we were. Both could.
Joseph Wood Krutch
46.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
47.
A humanist is anyone who rejects the attempt to describe or account for man wholly on the basis of physics, chemistry or animal behaviour.
Joseph Wood Krutch
48.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
49.
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.
Joseph Wood Krutch
50.
August creates as she slumbers, replete and satisfied.
Joseph Wood Krutch