Without a sense of proportion there can be neither good taste nor genuine intelligence, nor perhaps moral integrity.

The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.

Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines.

Our originality shows itself most strikingly not in what we wholly originate but in what we do with that which we borrow from others.

To the old, the new is usually bad news.

Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.

Vaguely at first, then more distinctly, I realized that man is an eternal stranger on this planet.