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The cockroach and the bird were both here long before we were. Both could.

Joseph Wood Krutch

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Joseph Wood Krutch
Age: 76 †
Born: 1893
Born: November 25
Died: 1970
Died: May 22
Biographer
Journalist
Literary Critic
Naturalist
Theatre Critic
Writer
Knoxville
Tennessee
Cockroach
Cockroaches
Bird
Long

More quotes by Joseph Wood Krutch

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Life is very persistent and very ingenious in seizing every opportunity.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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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
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In history as it comes to be written, there is usually some Spirit of the Age which historians can define, but the shape of things is seldom so clear to those who live them. To most thoughtful men it has generally seemed that theirs was an Age of Confusion.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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The snow itself is lonely or, if you prefer, self-sufficient. There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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Those whose conscience demands that they defy authority in some ways that involve great consequences must be willing to accept some penalty.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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The most important part of our lives-our sensations, emotions, desires, and aspirations-takes place in a universe of illusions which science can attenuate or destroy, but which it is powerless to enrich.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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In the long run our boasted control of nature is a delusion.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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The wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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Technology made large populations possible large populations now make technology indispensable.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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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
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It is disastrous to own more of anything than you can possess, and it is one of the most fundamental laws of human nature that our power actually to possess is limited.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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The impulse to mar and to destroy is as ancient and almost as nearly universal as the impulse to create. The one is an easier way than the other of demonstrating power.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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The grand paradox of our society is this: we magnify man’s right but we minimize his capacities.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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Rhetoric takes no real account of the art in literature and morality takes no account of the art in life.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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It is sometimes easier to head an institute for the study of child guidance than it is to turn one brat into a decent human being.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many different ailments, but I have never heard of one who suffered from insomnia.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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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
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There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned.
Joseph Wood Krutch
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To those who study her, Nature reveals herself as extraordinarily fertile and ingenious in devising means, but she has no ends which the human mind has been able to discover or comprehend.
Joseph Wood Krutch