Edward Abbey: Most
Edward Abbey was American author and essayist. Explore interesting quotes on most.“The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.”
“Shadows from the Big Woods”, p. 225
The Journey Home (1977)
Context: The earth is not a mechanism but an organism, a being with its own life and its own reasons, where the support and sustenance of the human animal is incidental. If man in his newfound power and vanity persists in the attempt to remake the planet in his own image, he will succeed only in destroying himself — not the planet. The earth will survive our most ingenious folly.
"The First Morning", p. 1
Desert Solitaire (1968)
Context: This is the most beautiful place on earth.
There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio, or Rome — there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment.
Preface (dated June 1987) for 1988 reprint of Desert Solitaire
Desert Solitaire (1968)
Context: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
Source: The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader
Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990), Ch. 4 : Life and Death and All That p.43
“Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.”
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
Source: Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
“Most academic economists know nothing of economy. In fact, they know little of anything.”
Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990), Ch. 11 : Money Et Cetera, p. 97