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

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

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

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

Is it wholly fantastic to admit the possibility that Nature herself strove toward what we call beauty? Face to face with any one of the elaborate flowers which man's cultivation has had nothing to do with, it does not seem fantastic to me. We put survival first. But when we have a margin of safety left over, we expend it in the search for the beautiful. Who can say that Nature does not do the same?

Few people have ever seriously wished to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional form and ceremonies.

It is not a sentimental, but a grimly literal fact that unless we share this terrestrial globe with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be able to live on it for long.