Quotes from Edward Abbey

High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring

If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.

If you feel that you're not ready to die, never fear; nature will give you complete and adequate assistance when the time comes.

A city man is a home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die.

If you're never ridden a fast horse at a dead run across a desert valley at dawn, be of good cheer: You've only missed out on one half of life.

Simplicity is always a virtue.

It's true: Every time you kill an elk, you're saving some cow's life.

The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.

I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life -- if I live that long.

The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners -- and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.

In art as in life, form and subject, body and soul, are one.

Life is cruel? Compared to what?

Life imitates art -- but badly.

Life: another day, another dolor.

The basic science is not physics or mathematics but biology -- the study of life. We must learn to think both logically and bio-logically.

Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure.

We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism -- a Mongoloid metaphysic.

The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.

Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.

We spend more time working for our labor-saving machines than they do working for us.

A giant thirst is a great joy when quenched in time.

Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.

Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.

When riding my old Harley a ninety per at midnight down the Via Roma in Naples, I kept one consolation firmly in mind: If anything goes wrong, I'll never have time to regret it.