Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes & Sayings

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

The human mind can appreciate the One only by seeing it first in the Many. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Nothing is too great or too good to be true. Do not believe that we can imagine things better than they are. In the long run, in the ultimate outlook, in the eye of the Creator, the possibilities of existence, the possibilities open to us, are beyond our imagination. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Nature takes no account of even the most reasonable of human excuses. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Is it wholly fantastic to admit the possibility that Nature herself strove toward what we call beauty? Face to face with any one of the elaborate flowers which man's cultivation has had nothing to do with, it does not seem fantastic to me. We put survival first. But when we have a margin of safety left over, we expend it in the search for the beautiful. Who can say that Nature does not do the same? — Joseph Wood Krutch

There are some optimists who search eagerly for the skunk cabbage which in February sometimes pushes itself up through the ice, and who call it a sign of spring. I wish that I could feel that way about it, but I do not. The truth of the matter, to me, is simply that skunk cabbage blooms in the winter time. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Not to have known - as most men have not - either the mountain or the desert is not to have known one's self. Not to have known one's self is to have known no one. — Joseph Wood Krutch

In the long run our boasted control of nature is a delusion. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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

It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder. — Joseph Wood Krutch

The grand paradox of our society is this:
we magnify man's right but we minimize his capacities. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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

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

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

The flowers never waste their sweetness on the desert air or, for that matter, on the jungle air. In fact, they waste it only when nobody except a human being is there to smell it. It is for the bugs and a few birds, not for men, that they dye their petals or waft their scents. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

As machines get to be more and more like men, men will come to be more like machines. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

We need some contact with the things we sprang from. We need nature at least as a part of the context of our lives. Without cities we cannot be civilized. Without nature, without wilderness even, we are compelled to renounce an important part of our heritage. — Joseph Wood Krutch

The most important part of our lives-our sensations, emotions, desires, and aspirations-takes place in a universe of illusions which science can attenuate or destroy, but which it is powerless to enrich. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

When, in the present world, men behave well, that is no doubt sometimes because they are creatures of habit as well as, sometimes, because they are reasonable. — Joseph Wood Krutch

The cockroach and the bird were both here long before we were. Both could. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and a sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Though we face the facts of sex we are more reluctant than ever to face the fact of death or the crueler facts of life, either biological or social. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Rhetoric takes no real account of the art in literature and morality takes no account of the art in life. — Joseph Wood Krutch

The typical American believes that no necessity of the soul is free and that there are precious few, if any, which cannot be bought. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Man is the only one in whom the instinct of life falters long enough to enable it to ask the question Why? — 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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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

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

August creates as she slumbers, replete and satisfied. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Security depends not so much upon how much you have, as upon how much you can do without. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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

The wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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

We have not merely escaped from something but into something ... We have joined the greatest of all communities, which is not that of man alone but of everything which shares with us the great adventure of being alive. — Joseph Wood Krutch

We must not judge the society of the future by considering whether or not we should like to live in it; the question is whether those who have grown up in it will be happier than those who have grown up in our society or those of the past. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Technology made large populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

It is not a sentimental, but a grimly literal fact that unless we share this terrestrial globe with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be able to live on it for long. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Being the inventor of sex would seem to be a sufficient distinction for a creature just barely large enough to be seen by the naked eye. — Joseph Wood Krutch

To those who study her, Nature reveals herself as extraordinarily fertile and ingenious in devising means, but she has no ends which the human mind has been able to discover or comprehend. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

The mind leaps, and leaps perhaps with a sort of elation, through the immensities of space, but the spirit, frightened and cold, longs to have once more above its head the inverted bowl beyond which may lie whatever paradise its desires may create. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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

Those whose conscience demands that they defy authority in some ways that involve great consequences must be willing to accept some penalty. — 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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Happiness is a kind of gratitude and vice versa. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Life is very persistent and very ingenious in seizing every opportunity. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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? — Joseph Wood Krutch

Custom has furnished the only basis which ethics have ever had. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

In a cat's eye, all things belong to cats. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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

What a man knows is everywhere at war with what he wants. — Joseph Wood Krutch

In history as it comes to be written, there is usually some Spirit of the Age which historians can define, but the shape of things is seldom so clear to those who live them. To most thoughtful men it has generally seemed that theirs was an Age of Confusion. — Joseph Wood Krutch

The advertiser is the overrewarded court jester and court pander at the democratic court. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Science has always promised two things not necessarily related; an increase first in our powers, second in our happiness or wisdom, and we have come to realize that it is the first and less important of the two promises which it has kept most abundantly. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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. — Joseph Wood Krutch

Long before I ever saw the desert I was aware of the mystical overtones which the observation of nature made audible to me. But I have never been more frequently or more vividly aware of them than in connection with the desert phenomena. — Joseph Wood Krutch

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