Children feel the whiteness of the lily with a graphic and passionate clearness which we cannot give them at all. The only thing we can give them is information-the information that if you break the lily in two it won't grow again.

You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.

They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics.

I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.

Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root.

There is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs.

When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.