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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

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It Is Sometimes Easier

Joseph Wood Krutch

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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.

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If Only The Fit Survive And If The Fitter They Are The Longer They Survive, Then Volvox Must Have Demonstrated Its Superb Fitness More Conclusively Than Any Higher Animal Ever Has.

The Most Serious Charge Which Can Be Brought Against New England Is Not Puritanism, But February.... Spring Is Too Far Away To Comfort Even By Anticipation, And Winter Long Ago Lost The Charm Of Novelty. This Is The Very Three A.m. Of The Calendar.

Custom Has Furnished The Only Basis Which Ethics Have Ever Had.

Every Time A Value Is Born, Existence Takes On A New Meaning; Every Time One Dies, Some Part Of That Meaning Passes Away.

There Are Some Optimists Who Search Eagerly For The Skunk Cabbage Which In February Sometimes Pushes Itself Up Through The Ice, And Who Call It A Sign Of Spring. I Wish That I Could Feel That Way About It, But I Do Not. The Truth Of The Matter, To Me, Is Simply That Skunk Cabbage Blooms In The Winter Time.

Those Whose Conscience Demands That They Defy Authority In Some Ways That Involve Great Consequences Must Be Willing To Accept Some Penalty.

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.

The Cockroach And The Bird Were Both Here Long Before We Were. Both Could.

In Our Hearts Those Of Us Who Know Anything Worth Knowing Know That In March A New Year Begins, And If We Plan Any New Leaves, It Will Be When The Rest Of Nature Is Planning Them Too.

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.

If People Destroy Something Replaceable Made By Mankind, They Are Called Vandals; If They Destroy Something Irreplaceable Made By God, They Are Called Developers.

Nature, In Her Blind Thirst For Life Has Filled Every Possible Cranny Of The Rotting Earth With Some Sort Of Fantastic Creature.

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.

We Have Not Merely Escaped From Something But Into Something... We Have Joined The Greatest Of All Communities, Which Is Not That Of Man Alone But Of Everything Which Shares With Us The Great Adventure Of Being Alive.

Is It Wholly Fantastic To Admit The Possibility That Nature Herself Strove Toward What We Call Beauty? Face To Face With Any One Of The Elaborate Flowers Which Man's Cultivation Has Had Nothing To Do With, It Does Not Seem Fantastic To Me. We Put Survival First. But When We Have A Margin Of Safety Left Over, We Expend It In The Search For The Beautiful. Who Can Say That Nature Does Not Do The Same?

Happiness Is A Kind Of Gratitude And Vice Versa.

The Famous Balance Of Nature Is The Most Extraordinary Of All Cybernetic Systems. Left To Itself, It Is Always Self-regulated.

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.

Happiness Is Itself A Kind Of Gratitude.

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.

Whenever Man Forgets That Man Is An Animal, The Result Is Always To Make Him Less Humane.

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.

Rhetoric Takes No Real Account Of The Art In Literature And Morality Takes No Account Of The Art In Life.

A Tragic Writer Does Not Have To Believe In God, But He Must Believe In Man.

Both The Cockroach And The Bird Would Get Along Very Well Without Us, Although The Cockroach Would Miss Us Most.

The Mind Leaps, And Leaps Perhaps With A Sort Of Elation, Through The Immensities Of Space, But The Spirit, Frightened And Cold, Longs To Have Once More Above Its Head The Inverted Bowl Beyond Which May Lie Whatever Paradise Its Desires May Create.

In The Long Run Our Boasted Control Of Nature Is A Delusion.

February... Now More Than Ever One Must Remind Oneself That It Is Wasteful Folly To Wish That Time Would Pass, Or - As The Puritanical Old Saying Used To Have It - To Kill Time Until It Kills You.

The Grand Paradox Of Our Society Is This: We Magnify Man’s Right But We Minimize His Capacities.

Though We Face The Facts Of Sex We Are More Reluctant Than Ever To Face The Fact Of Death Or The Crueler Facts Of Life, Either Biological Or Social.

If We Do Not Permit The Earth To Produce Beauty And Joy, It Will In The End Not Produce Food, Either.

Civilizations Die From Philosophical Calm, Irony, And A Sense Of Fair Play Quite As Surely As They Die Of Debauchery.

Anxiety And Distress, Interrupted Occasionally By Pleasure, Is The Normal Course Of Man's Existence.

When, In The Present World, Men Behave Well, That Is No Doubt Sometimes Because They Are Creatures Of Habit As Well As, Sometimes, Because They Are Reasonable.

Long Before I Ever Saw The Desert I Was Aware Of The Mystical Overtones Which The Observation Of Nature Made Audible To Me. But I Have Never Been More Frequently Or More Vividly Aware Of Them Than In Connection With The Desert Phenomena.

Man Is, Perhaps, No More Prone To War Than He Used To Be And No More Inclined To Commit Other Evil Deeds. But A Given Amount Of Ill Will Or Folly Will Go Further Than It Used To.

August Creates As She Slumbers, Replete And Satisfied.

Man Is The Only One In Whom The Instinct Of Life Falters Long Enough To Enable It To Ask The Question "why?

As Machines Get To Be More And More Like Men, Men Will Come To Be More Like Machines.

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Life Is Very Persistent And Very Ingenious In Seizing Every Opportunity.

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.

In History As It Comes To Be Written, There Is Usually Some Spirit Of The Age Which Historians Can Define, But The Shape Of Things Is Seldom So Clear To Those Who Live Them. To Most Thoughtful Men It Has Generally Seemed That Theirs Was An Age Of Confusion.

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Electronic Calculators Can Solve Problems Which The Man Who Made Them Cannot Solve; But No Government-subsidized Commission Of Engineers And Physicists Could Create A Worm.

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The Advertiser Is The Overrewarded Court Jester And Court Pander At The Democratic Court.

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The Most Serious Charge Which Can Be Brought Against New England Is Not Puritanism But February.

In A Cat's Eye, All Things Belong To Cats.

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Logic Is The Art Of Going Wrong With Confidence.

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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.

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Being The Inventor Of Sex Would Seem To Be A Sufficient Distinction For A Creature Just Barely Large Enough To Be Seen By The Naked Eye.

To Be Individually Righteous Is The First Of All Duties, Come What May To Ones Self, To One's Country, To Society, And To Civilization Itself.

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.

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