The mind leaps, and leaps perhaps with a sort of elation, through the immensities of space, but the spirit, frightened and cold, longs to have once more above its head the inverted bowl beyond which may lie whatever paradise its desires may create.

A humanist is anyone who rejects the attempt to describe or account for man wholly on the basis of physics, chemistry or animal behaviour.

In the long run our boasted control of nature is a delusion.

February... Now more than ever one must remind oneself that it is wasteful folly to wish that time would pass, or - as the puritanical old saying used to have it - to kill time until it kills you.

Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence.

The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated.

It is not a sentimental, but a grimly literal fact that unless we share this terrestrial globe with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be able to live on it for long.