Edward Abbey
Are people more important than the grizzly bear? Only from the point of view of some people.Collection: Views
Don't talk to me about other worlds, separate realities, lost continents or invisible realms -- I know where I belong. Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.Collection: Home
Longevity, like intelligence and good looks and health and strength of character, is largely a matter of genetic heritage. Choose your parents with care.Collection: Character
Defiance is beautiful. The defiance of power, especially great or overwhelming power, exalts and glorifies the rebel.Collection: Beautiful
If it's knowledge and wisdom you want, then seek out the company of those who do real work for an honest purpose.Collection: Real
Women truly are better than men. Otherwise, they'd be intolerable.Collection: Men
There is a fine art to making enemies and it requires diligent cultivation. It's not as easy as it looks.Collection: Art
The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice.Collection: Oxygen
One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill.Collection: Dollar Bills
Great art is never perfect; perfect art is never great.Collection: Art
Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music.Collection: Hate
You can't belay a man who's falling in love.Collection: Falling In Love
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.Collection: Adventure
We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal.Collection: Sick
I thought of the wilderness we had left behind us, open to sea and sky, joyous in its plenitude and simplicity, perfect yet vulnerable, unaware of what is coming, defended by nothing, guarded by no one.Collection: Sea
Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.Collection: Suicidal
There never was a good war or a bad revolution.Collection: Veterans Day
To die alone, on rock under sun at the brink of the unknown, like a wolf, like a great bird, seems to me very good fortune indeed.Collection: Rocks
The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.Collection: Mean
At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, "thus far and no further." If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, "If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour.Collection: Regret
Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.Collection: Philosophy
By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. And his fate.Collection: Fate
The ever-rising cost of living: Someday soon, the corporate technicians will be locking meters on our noses and charging us a royalty on the air we breathe.Collection: Cost Of Living
In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert.Collection: Heart
All men are brothers, we like to say, half-wishing sometimes in secret it were not true. But perhaps it is true. And is the evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain? That also may be true. We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred.Collection: Brother
If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.Collection: Children
I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever.Collection: Death
America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.Collection: Country
It's true: Every time you kill an elk, you're saving some cow's life.Collection: Saving
Life is hard? True - but let's love it anyhow, though it breaks every bone in our bodies.Collection: True Love
Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.Collection: Thinking
Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody; and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height.Collection: Turkeys
Might does not make right but it sure makes what is.Collection: Doe
In the modern technoindustrial culture, it is possible to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood.Collection: Knowing
Beware of your wishes: They will probably come true.Collection: Wish
Jesus don't walk on water no more; his feet leak.Collection: Jesus
Humans were free before the word freedom became necessary.Collection: Humans
A good writer must have more than vin rosé in his veins, use more than Chablis for ink.Collection: Rose
Fence straddlers have no balls. In compensation, however, they enjoy a comfortable seat and can retreat swiftly, when danger threatens, to either side of the fence. There is something to be said for every position.Collection: Balls
My sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut in the desert, assume the lotus position, compose my mind and senses, and sink into meditation, contemplating my novel.Collection: Writing
Is the Archbishop's blessing any more meaningful than the Politician's handshake? The come, they go, with bigger things than us on their minds.Collection: Meaningful
Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama's lap from alcohol and infantilism.Collection: Sick
The desert wears... a veil of mystery. Motionless and silent it evokes in us an elusive hint of something unknown, unknowable, about to be revealed. Since the desert does not act it seems to be waiting -- but waiting for what?Collection: Waiting
Mayonnaise, like hollandaise, was invented by the French to cover up the flavor of spoiled flesh, stale vegetables, rotten fish. Beware the sauce! Where food comes beslobbered with an elegant slime you may well suspect the integrity of the basic ingredients.Collection: Integrity
Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.Collection: Solitude
Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County: any town with thirteen churches and only four bars has got an incipient social problem. That town is looking for trouble.Collection: Church
Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice.Collection: Sadness