Edward Abbey Quotes

I read 'The Conspiracy Against the Human Race' and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writer's ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.

If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.

The poet complains or points out the discontent that lies at the heart of man, the individual man, and how can that be redeemed?

Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.

I struggle with how humankind ended up this way. We made ourselves slaves to money, and we all have to work and be a part of this thing when time is always ticking. And before we know it, a decade has gone by, and did I really get to do everything I wanted to do or say everything I wanted to say?

Someone was trying to kill Lady Alexia Maccon. It was most inconvenient, as she was in a dreadful hurry. Given her previous familiarity with near-death experiences and their comparative frequency with regards to her good self, Alexia should probably have allowed extra time for such a predictable happenstance.

See the judge upon the bench who tries the case as best he can, see the wise and wicked ones who feed upon life's sacred fire, see the soldier with his gun who must be dead to be admired.

Lord, help us to see in your crucifixion and resurrection an example of how to endure and seemingly to die in the agony and conflict of daily life, so that we may live more fully and creatively. You accepted patiently and humbly the rebuffs of human life, as well as the torture of the cross. Help us to accept the pains and conflicts that come to us each day as opportunity to grow as people and become more like you-make us realize that it is only by frequent deaths of ourselves, and our self-centered desires that we can come to live more fully, only by dying with you that we can rise with you.

Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead.

The convent is supreme egotism resulting in supreme self-denial.

We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.

The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us,...The madness of this planet is largely a result of the human being's difficulty in coming to viruous balance with himself.

What does God hate or punish except self-will? Let self-will cease, and there will be no hell. On what does that fire feed except on self-will?

Thus with my lips have I denounced you, while my heart, bleeding within me, called you tender names. It was love lashed by its own self that spoke. It was pride half slain that fluttered in the dust. It was my hunger for your love that raged from the housetop, while my own love, kneeling in silence, prayed your forgiveness.

Self-awareness is a trait that not only makes us human but also paradoxically makes us want to be more than merely human. As I said in my BBC Reith Lectures, “Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence

Modern man has lost the option of silence.

The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation andsecurity. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.

I lock my door upon myself, And bar them out; but who shall wall Self from myself, most loathed of all?

Modern life. Where are we running? Sometimes what we want is not always where we are... Are we alone? Is the real winter inside our hearts? We are all struggling for definition in a world that resists our increase.

Religion is not a matter of God, church, holy cause, etc. These are but accessories. The source of religious preoccupation is in the self, or rather the rejection of the self. Dedication in the obverse side of self-rejection. Man alone is a religious animal because, as Montaigne points out, it is a malady confined to man, and not seen in any other creature, to hate and despise ourselves.

The world in which we live today-reflecting in so many way the opposite of our sweetness and love-reminds us how desperately important it is to break the spell that's been cast on the human race and retrieve our shining self.

If thou dost seek to have what thou dost hide, By self-example mayst thou be denied.

We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.

God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?