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.Collection: Journey
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.Collection: Science
Happiness is a kind of gratitude and vice versa.Collection: Gratitude
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.Collection: Waiting
Nature takes no account of even the most reasonable of human excuses.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Lying
The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Animal
Life is very persistent and very ingenious in seizing every opportunity.Collection: Life
There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned.Collection: Action
As machines get to be more and more like men, men will come to be more like machines.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Important
The advertiser is the overrewarded court jester and court pander at the democratic court.Collection: Advertising
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.Collection: Sex
Man is the only one in whom the instinct of life falters long enough to enable it to ask the question "Why?Collection: Men
Love is ...not a fact in nature of which we become aware, but rather a creation of the human imagination.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Wish
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?Collection: Life
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.Collection: Thoughtful
Nature, in her blind thirst for life has filled every possible cranny of the rotting earth with some sort of fantastic creature.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Cat
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?Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Nature
Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and a sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.Collection: Philosophical
Those whose conscience demands that they defy authority in some ways that involve great consequences must be willing to accept some penalty.Collection: Demand
An abundance of some good things is perfectly compatible with the scarcity of others; that life is everywhere precarious, man everywhere small.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Sex
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.Collection: New Year
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.Collection: Animal
Rhetoric takes no real account of the art in literature and morality takes no account of the art in life.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Wisdom