# Edgar Pangborn

- Quotes: 37
- Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/edgar-pangborn

## Books

- [A Mirror for Observers](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edgar-pangborn/a-mirror-for-observers.md) — 31 quotes
- [Good Neighbors and Other Strangers](https://www.leafyquotes.com/edgar-pangborn/good-neighbors-and-other-strangers.md) — 6 quotes

## Recently added quotes

> At one point early in his journal Dr. Bannerman describes himself as “a naturalist of the puttering type—I would rather sit on a log then write monographs: it pays off better.”

p. 128

> Never, beautiful Earth, never even at the height of the human storms have I forgotten you, my planet Earth, your forests and your fields, your oceans, the serenity of your mountains; the meadows, the continuing rivers, the incorruptible promise of returning spring.

p. 222

> I admit almost every charge of the indictment. The only thing wrong with it is that it’s too partial, too trivial. You’ve spent your life hunting for counterfeit money in a pile of treasure. You looked for evil all your life, to prove your case—naturally you found it, and where it was absent you created it. Any fool can do that. I’ve looked for good in human nature and elsewhere, and found it, heaped up and flowing over. Anyone can do that too, though good may be a little harder to see, because it’s all around you, no further away than the nearest leaf, the nearest smile or pleasant word, no further away than every breath of air. You say there’s no truth in men. Do you know what truth is, any more than Pilate did? Human beings are in the early stages of trying to accept and understand empirical truth.

p. 201

> If you’re interested in ethics, you could do worse than think in terms of geological time.

p. 178

> I learned some years back that human nature is volatile stuff in a world full of lighted matches.

p. 178

> Haven’t you stopped to wonder why men want a scapegoat? What is it, what was it ever, but a device to help them avoid looking at themselves?

p. 214

> One who can define kindness only as the absence of cruelty has surely not begun to understand the nature of either.

p. 154

> Their door closed; presently she cried out in that desired pain that is brief release from trouble.

p. 41

> If there must be blame, then all citizens—you, I, everyone—are responsible for letting it be that kind of world, for not placing ethical development ahead of every other kind. We understand ethical necessities quite well; we’ve been capable of understanding them for several thousand years; but we haven’t been willing to let them rule our actions—it’s that simple.

p. 214

> The three billion crawl about, all over the helpless earth, destroying and defiling, killing the forests, polluting the air with smoke and radioactive dust and the torturing noises of the machine. In place of meadows, filling stations. The lakes are puddles of human filth. Two years ago the whole area of San Francisco Harbor was covered with dead fish: even the ocean is sick from the human taint, and this they call progress.

p. 201

> A crisis passed usually means another one approached.

p. 82

> The ocean, forever changing and the same, was awake with deep music tonight; I was alone and not alone at all. Not alone, looking down some hours from the moving bow, seeing the flash and lingering subsidence of the noctilucae, those living diamonds of the sea, their light as transient as the sea foam and eternal as life, if life is eternal. Everything goes with me, the cherished faces, the words that endure although no embodied voice is near my body but only the great continuing voice of the sea and of a westerly wind out of the open regions of the world. I am not alone.

p. 215