Both the cockroach and the bird would get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most.

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?

If we are deprived of hope as well as fear, we are compensated by being given an almost endless patience for enduring or simply for waiting.

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.

As machines get to be more and more like men, men will come to be more like machines.

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.

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