Is it wholly fantastic to admit the possibility that Nature herself strove toward what we call beauty? Face to face with any one of the elaborate flowers which man's cultivation has had nothing to do with, it does not seem fantastic to me. We put survival first. But when we have a margin of safety left over, we expend it in the search for the beautiful. Who can say that Nature does not do the same?

Only those within whose own consciousness the sun rise and set, the leaves burgeon and wither, can be said to be aware of what living is.

Not to have known - as most men have not - either the mountain or the desert is not to have known one's self. Not to have known one's self is to have known no one.

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and a sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.

There is no such thing as a dangerous woman; there are only susceptible men.

We must not judge the society of the future by considering whether or not we should like to live in it; the question is whether those who have grown up in it will be happier than those who have grown up in our society or those of the past.

We have not merely escaped from something but into something... We have joined the greatest of all communities, which is not that of man alone but of everything which shares with us the great adventure of being alive.