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Great art is never perfect perfect art is never great.

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
Ballet
Perfect
Art
Great
Never

More quotes by Edward Abbey

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Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.
Edward Abbey
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But of the seven deadly sins, wrath is the healthiest - next only to lust.
Edward Abbey
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We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism -- a Mongoloid metaphysic.
Edward Abbey
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Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society.
Edward Abbey
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Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music.
Edward Abbey
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Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and the powerful.
Edward Abbey
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The developers and entrepreneurs must somehow be taught a new vocabulary of values.
Edward Abbey
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There are no vacant lots in nature.
Edward Abbey
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There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.
Edward Abbey
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I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.
Edward Abbey
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The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice.
Edward Abbey
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The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks, love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness.
Edward Abbey
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It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written.
Edward Abbey
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What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.
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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Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rdworld black, lesbian, feminist, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist.
Edward Abbey
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Every man has two vocations: his own and philosophy.
Edward Abbey
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When I write paradise I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes - disease and death and the rotting of flesh.
Edward Abbey
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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
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If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.
Edward Abbey