Quotes from Joseph Wood Krutch

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.

And the thing which is missing is love, some feeling for, as well as some understanding of, the inclusive community of rocks and soils, plants and animals, of which we are a part.

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.

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

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

Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.

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 forms and ceremonies.

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

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

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

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.

Whenever man forgets that man is an animal, the result is always to make him less humane.

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

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.

Nature, in her blind thirst for life, has filled every possible cranny of the rotting earth with some sort of fantastic creature, and among them man is but one — perhaps the most miserable of all, because he is the only one in whom the instinct of life falters long enough to enable it to ask the question "Why?"

As machines get to be more and more like men, men will come to be more like machines.

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

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

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

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.

Electronic calculators can solve problems which the man who made them cannot solve; but no government subsidised commission of engineers and physicists could create a worm.

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.