Nature attains perfection, but man never does.

The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.

Action can give us the feeling of being useful, but only words can give us a sense of weight and purpose.

By all odds, earliest man, so naked to the elements and to deadly enemies, should have existed in a state of constant shock. We find him instead the only lighthearted being in a deadly serious universe.... He alone, with childish carelessness, tinkered and played, and exerted himself more in the pursuit of superfluities than of necessities. Yet the tinkering and playing, and the fascination with the nonessential, were a chief source of the inventiveness which enabled man to prevail over better-equipped and more-purposeful animals.

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

A man by himself is in bad company.

That which corrodes the souls of the persecuted is the monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them.