Top 70 Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

2. “The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

3. “Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

4. “The wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

5. “Technology made large populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

6. “Nothing is too great or too good to be true. Do not believe that we can imagine things better than they are. In the long run, in the ultimate outlook, in the eye of the Creator, the possibilities of existence, the possibilities open to us, are beyond our imagination.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

7. “Security depends not so much upon how much you have, as upon how much you can do without.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

8. “Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man’s existence.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

9. “In a cat’s eye, all things belong to cats.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

10. “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

11. “If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

12. “August creates as she slumbers, replete and satisfied.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

13. “Every time a value is born, existence takes on a new meaning; every time one dies, some part of that meaning passes away.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

14. “If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

15. “Both the cockroach and the bird would get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

16. “Only those within whose own consciousness the sun rise and set, the leaves burgeon and wither, can be said to be aware of what living is.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

17. “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

18. “The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

19. “Any euphemism ceases to be euphemistic after a time and the true meaning begins to show through. It’s a losing game, but we keep on trying.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

20. “Custom has furnished the only basis which ethics have ever had.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

21. “To have passed through life and never experienced solitude is to have never known oneself. To have never known oneself is to have never known anyone.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

22. “As machines get to be more and more like men, men will come to be more like machines.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

23. “The flowers never waste their sweetness on the desert air or, for that matter, on the jungle air. In fact, they waste it only when nobody except a human being is there to smell it. It is for the bugs and a few birds, not for men, that they dye their petals or waft their scents.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

24. “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

25. “There is no such thing as a dangerous woman; there are only susceptible men.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

26. “Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

27. “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

28. “When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal. When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

29. “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

30. “What a man knows is everywhere at war with what he wants.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

31. “It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

32. “A humanist is anyone who rejects the attempt to describe or account for man wholly on the basis of physics, chemistry or animal behaviour.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

33. “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

34. “It is not a sentimental, but a grimly literal fact that unless we share this terrestrial globe with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be able to live on it for long.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

35. “Two-legged creatures we are supposed to love as we love ourselves. The four-legged, also, can come to seem pretty important. But six legs are too many from the human standpoint.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

36. “Nature, in her blind thirst for life has filled every possible cranny of the rotting earth with some sort of fantastic creature.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

37. “If we are deprived of hope as well as fear, we are compensated by being given an almost endless patience for enduring or simply for waiting.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

38. “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

39. “We need some contact with the things we sprang from. We need nature at least as a part of the context of our lives. Without cities we cannot be civilized. Without nature, without wilderness even, we are compelled to renounce an important part of our heritage.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

40. “True tragedy may be defined as a dramatic work in which the outward failure of the principal personage is compensated for by the dignity and greatness of his character.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

41. “Perhaps we are wiser, less foolish and more far-seeing than we were two hundred years ago. But we are still imperfect in all these things, and since the turn of the century it has been remarked that neither wisdom nor virtue have increased as rapidly as the need for both.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

42. “Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and a sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

43. “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

44. “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

45. “There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

46. “Life is very persistent and very ingenious in seizing every opportunity.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

47. “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

48. “Few people have ever seriously wished to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional form and ceremonies.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

49. “An abundance of some good things is perfectly compatible with the scarcity of others; that life is everywhere precarious, man everywhere small.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch

50. “Poetry, mythology, and religion represent the world as man would like to have it, while science represents the world as he gradually comes to discover it.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch