JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude.

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.

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

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.

Life is very persistent and very ingenious in seizing every opportunity.

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.

The rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at, but the moment when we are capable of seeing.

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.

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

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

The human mind can appreciate the One only by seeing it first in the Many.