The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.

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.

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.

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.

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

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

And the thing which is missing is love, some feeling for, as well as some understanding of, the inclusive community of rocks and soils, plants and animals, of which we are a part.