Quote

I was once invited to take part in a heroic, possibly fatal enterprise, but I declined, mainly on account of sloth.

Edward Abbey

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Edward Abbey
Age: 62 †
Born: 1927
Born: January 29
Died: 1989
Died: March 14
Author
Environmentalist
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Writer
Edward Paul Abbey
Take
Mainly
Invited
Heroic
Account
Enterprise
Possibly
Declined
Accounts
Sloth
Part
Fatal

More quotes by Edward Abbey

Image
I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.
Edward Abbey
Image
Beware of the man who has no enemies.
Edward Abbey
Image
The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often.
Edward Abbey
Image
The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys, the motion of the traffic. The mighty towers stood like tombstones in a graveyard, leaning against the sky and waiting for -- for what? Someday we'll know.
Edward Abbey
Image
If the world is irrational, we can never know it -- either it or its irrationality.
Edward Abbey
Image
All dams are ugly, but the Glen Canyon Dam is sinful ugly.
Edward Abbey
Image
It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.
Edward Abbey
Image
Home is where, when you have to go there, you probably shouldn't.
Edward Abbey
Image
I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.
Edward Abbey
Image
A life without tragedy would not be worth living.
Edward Abbey
Image
Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati -- those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues.
Edward Abbey
Image
In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert.
Edward Abbey
Image
What is reason? Knowledge informed by sympathy, intelligence in the arms of love.
Edward Abbey
Image
Motherhood is an essential, difficult, and full-time job. Women who do not wish to be mothers should not have babies.
Edward Abbey
Image
The great question of life is not the question of death but the question of life. Fear of death shames us all.
Edward Abbey
Image
The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.
Edward Abbey
Image
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
Image
The knowledge that refuge is available, when and if needed, makes the silent inferno of the desert more easily bearable. Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization.
Edward Abbey
Image
The earth, like the sun, like the air, belongs to everyone - and to no one.
Edward Abbey
Image
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