A book ... unlike a television program, moving picture or any other 'modern means of communication' ... can wait for years, yet be available at any moment when it happens to be needed.

The wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.

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?

Man is the only one in whom the instinct of life falters long enough to enable it to ask the question "Why?

Both the cockroach and the bird would get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most.

Happiness is a kind of gratitude and vice versa.

Though many have tried, no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science, which can do so much, cannot decide what it ought to do.