To have passed through life and never experienced solitude is to have never known oneself. To have never known oneself is to have never known anyone.

Technology made large populations possible; large populations now make technology indispensable.

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and a sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.

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

Long before I ever saw the desert I was aware of the mystical overtones which the observation of nature made audible to me. But I have never been more frequently or more vividly aware of them than in connection with the desert phenomena.

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.

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