Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

The question "How many legs does a normal man have?" should be answered by finding a statistical average. And since some men have only one leg, or none, this would lead inevitably to the conclusion that a "normal" man is equipped with one and some fraction legs.

Joseph Wood Krutch
The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.

Joseph Wood Krutch
[The advertiser] is the overrewarded court jester and court pander at the democratic court.

Joseph Wood Krutch
The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated.

Joseph Wood Krutch
It is not a sentimental, but a grimly literal fact that unless we share this terrestrial globe with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be able to live on it for long.

Joseph Wood Krutch
Long before I ever saw the desert I was aware of the mystical overtones which the observation of nature made audible to me. But I have never been more frequently or more vividly aware of them than in connection with the desert phenomena.

Joseph Wood Krutch
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.

Joseph Wood Krutch
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?

Joseph Wood Krutch
The rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at, but the moment when we are capable of seeing.

Joseph Wood Krutch
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.

Joseph Wood Krutch
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?

Joseph Wood Krutch
The typical American believes that no necessity of the soul is free and that there are precious few, if any, which cannot be bought.

Joseph Wood Krutch
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.

Joseph Wood Krutch
Technology made large populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable.

Joseph Wood Krutch
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.

Joseph Wood Krutch
The human mind can appreciate the One only by seeing it first in the Many.

Joseph Wood Krutch
Nature takes no account of even the most reasonable of human excuses.

Joseph Wood Krutch
The flowers never waste their sweetness on the desert air or, for that matter, on the jungle air. In fact, they waste it only when nobody except a human being is there to smell it. It is for the bugs and a few birds, not for men, that they dye their petals or waft their scents.

Joseph Wood Krutch
If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.

Joseph Wood Krutch
Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many ailments, but I never heard of one who suffered from insomnia.

Joseph Wood Krutch
559339 - [a Londoner describing countryside:] A damp sort of place where all sorts of birds fly about uncooked.

Joseph Wood Krutch
Nature, in her blind thirst for life has filled every possible cranny of the rotting earth with some sort of fantastic creature.

Joseph Wood Krutch
Life is very persistent and very ingenious in seizing every opportunity.

Joseph Wood Krutch
We are committed to the scientific method, and measurement is the foundation of that method; hence we are prone to assume that whatever is measurable must be significant and that whatever cannot be measured may as well be disregarded.

Joseph Wood Krutch
The Wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.

Joseph Wood Krutch