Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder.

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
When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him Vandal. When he wantonly destroys one of the works of God we call him Sportsman.

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
Security depends not so much upon how much you have, as upon how much you can do without.

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
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
The stars are little twinkling rogues who light us home sometimes when we are drunk but care for neither you nor me nor any man.

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
No other contrast is so tremendous as this contrast between what lives and what does not.

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
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
Custom has furnished the only basis which ethics have ever had.

Joseph Wood Krutch
The most important reason why there are so many gaps in the available life histories of even the commoner animals is less the perversity of professors than the fact that there are an awful lot of these common creatures and that actually to follow their lives from day to day is a very difficult time-consuming task.

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
The cockroach and the bird were both here long before we were. Both could.

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
One need not accept Shaw's own estimate of his intellectual equipment to see that the doctor's remark cut through a confusion in which psychologists and sociologists flounder. Frequently they make no distinction between what is "normal" and what is "usual", "average", or "statistically probable".

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
Two-legged creatures we are supposed to love as well 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
As machines get to be more and more like men, men will come to be more like machines.

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