How anyone can profess to find animal life interesting and yet take delight in reducing the wonder of any animal to a bloody mass of fur or feathers?

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

The flowers never waste their sweetness on the desert air or, for that matter, on the jungle air. In fact, they waste it only when nobody except a human being is there to smell it. It is for the bugs and a few birds, not for men, that they dye their petals or waft their scents.

The most important part of our lives-our sensations, emotions, desires, and aspirations-takes place in a universe of illusions which science can attenuate or destroy, but which it is powerless to enrich.

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

There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned.

Custom has furnished the only basis which ethics have ever had.