Quotes by Joseph Wood Krutch

Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are a subject to a good many different ailments, but I have never heard of one who has suffered from insomnia.

Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.

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.

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

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

Civilizations die from philosophical calm irony and the sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.

Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.

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 forms and ceremonies.

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

When a man wantonly destroys a work of man we call him a vandal when a man destroys one of the works of God we call him a sportsman.

Though many have tried no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science which can do so much cannot decide what it ought to do.

Security depends not so much upon how much you have as upon how much you can do without.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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