Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes
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Those whose conscience demands that they defy authority in some ways that involve great consequences must be willing to accept some penalty.
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Both the cockroach and the bird would get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Happiness is a kind of gratitude and vice versa.
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The human mind can appreciate the One only by seeing it first in the Many.
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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.
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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.
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In the long run our boasted control of nature is a delusion.
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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.
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Every time a value is born, existence takes on a new meaning; every time one dies, some part of that meaning passes away.
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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?
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The advertiser is the overrewarded court jester and court pander at the democratic court.
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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.
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A tragic writer does not have to believe in God, but he must believe in man.
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August creates as she slumbers, replete and satisfied.
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In a cat's eye, all things belong to cats.
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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.
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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.
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If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.
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An abundance of some good things is perfectly compatible with the scarcity of others; that life is everywhere precarious, man everywhere small.
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The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.
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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.
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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.
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