Quotes from Joseph Wood Krutch

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.

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.

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.

Man is the only one in whom the instinct of life falters long enough to enable it to ask the question "Why?

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him Vandal. When he wantonly destroys one of the works of God we call him Sportsman.

Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many ailments, but I never heard of one who suffered from insomnia.

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.

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

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.

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

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