The wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.

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

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

An abundance of some good things is perfectly compatible with the scarcity of others; that life is everywhere precarious, man everywhere small.

The rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at, but the moment when we are capable of seeing.

February... Now more than ever one must remind oneself that it is wasteful folly to wish that time would pass, or - as the puritanical old saying used to have it - to kill time until it kills you.

Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence.