Joseph Wood Krutch Quotes

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

Understanding reduces the greatest to simplicity, and lack of its causes the least to take on the magnitude.

If tolerance is the best we can do in this moment, then by all means let's be tolerant. But by stopping there, by merely tolerating each other, we miss so much.

I do not feel happy when a collection is understood too well.

God is Unity, but always works in variety.

From out of all the many particulars comes oneness, and out of oneness come all the many particulars.

The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.

Understanding is simple. Knowing is complicated.

The human mind makes foolish divisions in what love sees as one.

Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real.

You cannot conceive the many without the one.

I think we as human beings need to be able to appreciate each other's differences and I think jazz really takes us in that direction.

We will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.

That we can be e pluribus Unum - out of one, many

Mind cannot think without duality. Duality is the way of thinking. In silence, all dualities disappear.

Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much.

When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity.

The eye of understanding is like the eye of the sense; for as you may see great objects through small crannies or levels, so you may see great axioms of nature through small and contemptible instances.

At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses of mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this study.

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for...There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre.

It is a magnificent feeling to recognize the unity of complex phenomena which appear to be things quite apart from the direct visible truth.

All the best things are seen first of all at a far distance.

Or perhaps all those things you missed upon first glance mean much more than you could ever guess.

A moment comes when "other" is no longer other.