There are some optimists who search eagerly for the skunk cabbage which in February sometimes pushes itself up through the ice, and who call it a sign of spring. I wish that I could feel that way about it, but I do not. The truth of the matter, to me, is simply that skunk cabbage blooms in the winter time.

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.

The human mind can appreciate the One only by seeing it first in the Many.

It is not ignorance but knowledge which is the mother of wonder.

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

If we are deprived of hope as well as fear, we are compensated by being given an almost endless patience for enduring or simply for waiting.

Nature takes no account of even the most reasonable of human excuses.