Quotes from Joseph Wood Krutch

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

The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.

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

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

For a real glimpse into an almost vanished world, one should look...at a scorpion who so obviously has no business lingering into the twentieth century. He is not shaped like a spider and he has too many legs to be an insect. Plainly, he is a discontinued model--still running but very difficult, one imagines, to get spare parts for.

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

Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.

When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal, when he wantonly destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman.

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

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

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.

Up up and quit your books' is not an adjuration commonly thought advisable in universities but there are occasions -- as for instance, when studying Wordsworth when it might be advisable.

When a man despoils a work of art we call him a vandal, when he despoils a work of nature we call him a developer.

Killing for sport is the perfect type of that pure evil for which metaphysicians have sometimes sought. Most wicked deeds are done because the doer proposes some good to himself ... [but] the killer for sport has no such comprehensible motive. He prefers death to life, darkness to light. He gets nothing except the satisfaction of saying, Something that wanted to live is dead. There is that much less vitality, consciousness, and, perhaps, joy in the universe. I am the Spirit that Denies.

I have drawn from books written by learned experts and also upon my observation of living creatures in whom I have long delighted and with whom I have perhaps more sympathy than some of those who remain austerely scientific. The intuitions of a lover are not always to be trusted; but neither are those of the loveless.

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

If we do not allow the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either. —JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH, "CONSERVATION IS NOT ENOUGH" (1954)

As for this present unhappy time, haunted by ghosts from a dead world and not yet at home in its own, its predicament is not unlike the predicament of the adolescent who has not yet learned to orient himself without reference to the mythology amid which his childhood was passed.

In the legends of the saints and the prophets, either a desert or a mountain is pretty sure to figure. It is usually in the middle of one or on the top of the other that the vision comes or the test is met. To give their message to the world they come down or come out, but it is almost invariably in a solitude, either high or dry, that it is first revealed.

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

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

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.

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

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