Security depends not so much upon how much you have, as upon how much you can do without.

We need some contact with the things we sprang from. We need nature at least as a part of the context of our lives. Without cities we cannot be civilized. Without nature, without wilderness even, we are compelled to renounce an important part of our heritage.

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

Happiness is a kind of gratitude and vice versa.

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

The impulse to mar and to destroy is as ancient and almost as nearly universal as the impulse to create. The one is an easier way than the other of demonstrating power.

It is sometimes easier to head an institute for the study of child guidance than it is to turn one brat into a decent human being.