Quote

To be alive is to take risks to be always safe and secure is death.

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
Risks
Secure
Safe
Risk
Alive
Death
Take
Always

More quotes by Edward Abbey

Image
The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyong reach it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see.
Edward Abbey
Image
Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.
Edward Abbey
Image
The best American writers have come from the hinterlands -- Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.
Edward Abbey
Image
Desert springtime, with flowers popping up all over the place, trees leafing out, streams gushing down from the mountains. Great time of year for hiking, camping, exploring, sleeping under the new moon and the old stars. At dawn and at evening we hear the coyotes howling with excitement—mating season.
Edward Abbey
Image
One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium.
Edward Abbey
Image
Everyone should learn a manual trade: It's never too late to become an honest person.
Edward Abbey
Image
Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.
Edward Abbey
Image
I’m tired of doing what I don’t want to do to live the way I don’t want to live.
Edward Abbey
Image
A pretty girl can do no wrong.
Edward Abbey
Image
All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self- justifying -- a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings, if only for an hour.
Edward Abbey
Image
Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.
Edward Abbey
Image
Humans were free before the word freedom became necessary.
Edward Abbey
Image
Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County: any town with thirteen churches and only four bars has got an incipient social problem. That town is looking for trouble.
Edward Abbey
Image
Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
Edward Abbey
Image
Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.
Edward Abbey
Image
How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.
Edward Abbey
Image
Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same world.
Edward Abbey
Image
Men have never loved one another much, for reasons we can readily understand: Man is not a lovable animal.
Edward Abbey
Image
Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.
Edward Abbey
Image
Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.
Edward Abbey