Top 500 Edward Abbey Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.”

— Edward Abbey

452. “Man was created to complete the horse.”

— Edward Abbey

453. “If there’s anything I hate, it’s the vibraphone. And the cha-cha-cha. And Latin rhythms generally.”

— Edward Abbey

454. “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

455. “I’m a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts.”

— Edward Abbey

456. “A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.”

— Edward Abbey

457. “Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.”

— Edward Abbey

458. “It seems clear at last that our love for the natural world-Nature-is the only means by which we can requite God’s obvious love for it.”

— Edward Abbey

459. “A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.”

— Edward Abbey

460. “Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book’s eventual fate.”

— Edward Abbey

461. “What good is a Bill of Rights that does not include the right to play, to wander, to explore, the right to stillness and solitude, to discovery and physical freedom?”

— Edward Abbey

462. “If, as some say, evil lies in the hearts and not the institutions of men, then there’s hardly a distinction worth making between, say, Hitler’s Germany and Rebecca’s Sunnybrook Farm.”

— Edward Abbey

463. “Though I’ve lived in the rural West most of my life, I never once fell in love with a horse. Not once. Neither end.”

— Edward Abbey

464. “There has never been an ‘original’ sin: each is quite banal.”

— Edward Abbey

465. “Generally speaking, it’s a matter of only mild intellectual interest to me whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun goes around the earth. In fact, I don’t care a rat’s ass either way.”

— Edward Abbey

466. “The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.”

— Edward Abbey

467. “There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author’s self- effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice.”

— Edward Abbey

468. “One can imagine a sane, healthy, cheerful human society based on no more than the principles of common sense, as validated each day by work, play, and living experience. But this remains the most utopian and fantastic of ideals.”

— Edward Abbey

469. “A man’s duty? To be ready – with rifle or rood – to defend his home when the showdown comes.”

— Edward Abbey

470. “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

471. “Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.”

— Edward Abbey

472. “England has never enjoyed a genuine social revolution. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with that dear, tepid, vapid, insipid, stuffy, little country.”

— Edward Abbey

Featured in: Country Quotes

473. “When riding my old Harley a ninety per at midnight down the Via Roma in Naples, I kept one consolation firmly in mind: If anything goes wrong, I’ll never have time to regret it.”

— Edward Abbey

474. “Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where’s our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you’ll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady’s foot.”

— Edward Abbey

475. “If the world is irrational, we can never know it – either it or its irrationality.”

— Edward Abbey

476. “I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever.”

— Edward Abbey

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

— Edward Abbey

478. “I’ve wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets – the seventeen who got away.”

— Edward Abbey

479. “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

480. “Preacher to me: ‘A dollar for the Lord, brother?’ Me to preacher: ‘That’s all right, I’m headed his way. I’ll give it to him when I see him.’”

— Edward Abbey

481. “Serious critics, serious librarians, serious associate professors of English will if they read this work dislike it intensely; at least I hope so.”

— Edward Abbey

482. “Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life.”

— Edward Abbey

483. “Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you’ve nothing better to do.”

— Edward Abbey

Featured in: Reading Quotes

484. “The absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it.”

— Edward Abbey

485. “Life is cruel? Compared to what?”

— Edward Abbey

486. “Is it possible to grow wiser without knowing it? One hopes so. We all hope so.”

— Edward Abbey

487. “In America, as elsewhere, the general irritability level keeps rising.”

— Edward Abbey

488. “My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.”

— Edward Abbey

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

489. “By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.”

— Edward Abbey

490. “I would prefer to write about everything; what else is there? But one must be selective.”

— Edward Abbey

491. “Music is a savage art, a measured madness.”

— Edward Abbey

492. “The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.”

— Edward Abbey

Featured in: Reading Quotes

493. “Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.”

— Edward Abbey

494. “We judge individual man and women as we do nations and races – by the character of their achievement and by their achievement of character.”

— Edward Abbey

495. “Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.”

— Edward Abbey

496. “How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you’ve lived.”

— Edward Abbey

497. “Is the Archbishop’s blessing any more meaningful than the Politician’s handshake? The come, they go, with bigger things than us on their minds.”

— Edward Abbey

498. “Lavender clouds sail like a fleet of ships across the pale green dawn; each cloud, planed flat on the wind, has a base of fiery gold.”

— Edward Abbey

499. “Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere – particularly if they form loops.”

— Edward Abbey

500. “The night I filled an inside straight: Even a blind hog’s gonna root up an acorn once in a while.”

— Edward Abbey