Edward Abbey - Man Quotes

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Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.

Edward Abbey
Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles....

Edward Abbey
This is the most beautiful place on earth. There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.

Edward Abbey
I know my own nation best. That's why I despise it the most. And know and love my own people, too, the swine. I'm a patriot. A dangerous man.

Edward Abbey
There's another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets it tends to separate a man from the world around him. If I switch it on my eyes adapt to it and I can see only the small pool of light it makes in front of me; I am isolated. Leaving the flashlight in my pocket where it belongs, I remain a part of the environment I walk through and my vision though limited has no sharp or definite boundary.

Edward Abbey
To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.

Edward Abbey
I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever.

Edward Abbey
The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.

Edward Abbey
Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear-the earth remains, slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break....I sometimes choose to think, no doubt perversely, that man is a dream, thought an illusion, and only rock is real. Rock and sun.

Edward Abbey
Of all the featherless beasts, only man, chained by his self-imposed slavery to the clock, denies the elemental fire and proceeds as best he can about his business, suffering quietly, martyr to his madness. Much to learn.

Edward Abbey
A man without passion would be like a body without a soul. Or even more
grotesque, like a soul without a body.

Edward Abbey
A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.

Edward Abbey