Quotes from Joseph Wood Krutch

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

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

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

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.

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.

When a man wantonly destroys a work of man we call him a vandal when a man destroys one of the works of God we call him a sportsman.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.

Happiness is a kind of gratitude and vice versa.

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.

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 famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated.

Though many have tried no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science which can do so much cannot decide what it ought to do.

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.

To be individually righteous is the first of all duties, come what may to ones self, to one's country, to society, and to civilization itself.

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

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.

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.

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