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.

Being the inventor of sex would seem to be a sufficient distinction for a creature just barely large enough to be seen by the naked eye.

Electronic calculators can solve problems which the man who made them cannot solve; but no government-subsidized commission of engineers and physicists could create a worm.

Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man's existence.

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

When, in the present world, men behave well, that is no doubt sometimes because they are creatures of habit as well as, sometimes, because they are reasonable.

The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism, but February.... Spring is too far away to comfort even by anticipation, and winter long ago lost the charm of novelty. This is the very three a.m. of the calendar.