Talk lives in a man’s head, but sometimes it is very lonely because in the heads of many men there is nothing to keep it company - and so talk goes out through the lips.

all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it.

the sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things.

To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told -- that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.

I know animals more gallant than the African warthog, but none more courageous. He is the peasant of the plains - the drab and dowdy digger in the earth. He is the uncomely but intrepid defender of family, home, and bourgeois convention, and he will fight anything of any size that intrudes upon his smug existence. ... His eyes are small and lightless and capable of but one expression - suspicion. What he does not understand, he suspects, and what he suspects, he fights.

If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.

If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.