The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Art, science, philosophy, religion -- each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Though I've lived in the rural West most of my life, I never once fell in love with a horse. Not once.… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Life is hard? True - but let's love it anyhow, though it breaks every bone in our bodies. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Walking takes longer... than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The ever-rising cost of living: Someday soon, the corporate technicians will be locking meters on our noses and charging us a royalty… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets --… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
One must be reasonable in one's demands on life. For myself, all that I ask is: (1) accurate information; (2) coherent knowledge;… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
I would give ten years off the beginning of my life to see, only once, Tyrannosaurus rex come rearing up from the… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
There comes a time in the life of us all when we must lay aside our books or put down our tools… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
If you're never ridden a fast horse at a dead run across a desert valley at dawn, be of good cheer: You've… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The city itself swung slowly toward us silent as a dream. No sign of life but puffs of steam from skyscraper chimneys,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“To make the distinction unmistakably clear: Civilization is the vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“A writer must be hard to live with: when not working he is miserable, and when he is working he is obsessed.… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred? Human… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
There is a deep, abiding, unshakable satisfaction in a life of complete failure. — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
In the end, for all our differences and conflicts, most women and men share the same food, work, shelter, bed, life, joy,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
“Life's a dog and then you die? No no. Life is a joyous dance through daffodils beneath cerulean blue skies and then,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
One can imagine a sane, healthy, cheerful human society based on no more than the principles of common sense, as validated each… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms. Love flowers best in openness… — Edward Abbey Copy Share Image
A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled… — Edward Abbey Copy Share
Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler's massacre of the Jews. Genocide's an old tradition, as human as… — Edward Abbey Copy Share
By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century. — Edward Abbey Copy Share
“Our institutions are too big; they represent not the best but the worst characteristics of human beings. By submitting to huge hierarchies of power,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share
No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as… — Edward Abbey Copy Share
Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all. — Edward Abbey Copy Share
“But why, the questioner insists, why do people like you pretend to love uninhabited country so much? Why this cult of wilderness? Why the… — Edward Abbey Copy Share
Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down. — Edward Abbey Copy Share
All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self- justifying -- a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share
“Me, I'm living under a sword too, as Jack may have told you. An old wino's disease, which could lay me in the grave… — Edward Abbey Copy Share
“Look here, I want to say, for godsake folks get out of them there machines, take off those fucking sunglasses and unpeel both eyeballs,… — Edward Abbey Copy Share
“What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.” — Edward Abbey Copy Share
