Quote

My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do NOTHING - and find it enough.

Edward Abbey

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Edward Abbey
Age: 62 †
Born: 1927
Born: January 29
Died: 1989
Died: March 14
Author
Environmentalist
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Writer
Edward Paul Abbey
Nothing
Truest
Enough
Deepest
Someday
Somehow
Ambition
Within
Ability
Find
Likewise

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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Walking takes longer... than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed.
Edward Abbey
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An empty man is full of himself.
Edward Abbey
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The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art and (2) sedition.
Edward Abbey
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I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I've encountered some unnecessary resistance that's because most of the traffic is going the other way.
Edward Abbey
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The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses.
Edward Abbey
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No man is wise enough to be another man's master. Each man's as good as the next -- if not a damn sight better.
Edward Abbey
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Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers -- obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls.
Edward Abbey
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Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere -- particularly if they form loops.
Edward Abbey
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I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them.
Edward Abbey
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Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter.
Edward Abbey
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Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead symmetrical but stiff.
Edward Abbey
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The sense of justice springs from self-respect both are coeval with our birth. Children are born with an innate sense of justice it usually takes twelve years of public schooling and four more years of college to beat it out of them.
Edward Abbey
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We're all undesirable elements from somebody's point of view.
Edward Abbey
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If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture--that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves. E.Abbey
Edward Abbey
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I am delighted, one more time, by the daring of my species and the audacity of our flying machines. There is poetry and music in our technology, a beauty as touching as that of eagle, moss campion, raven or yonder limestone boulder shining under the Arctic sun.
Edward Abbey
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Anywhere, anytime, I'd sacrifice the finest nuance for a laugh, the most elegant trope for a smile.
Edward Abbey
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Longevity, like intelligence and good looks and health and strength of character, is largely a matter of genetic heritage. Choose your parents with care.
Edward Abbey
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Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.
Edward Abbey
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Death is every man's final critic. To die well you must live bravely.
Edward Abbey
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For women, the sexual act is a means to a higher end. For a man, it is an end in itself.
Edward Abbey