Given the opportunity, under the right conditions, two cells from wildly different sources, a yeast cell, say, and a chicken erythrocyte, will touch, fuse, and the two nuclei will then fuse as well, and the new hybrid cell will now divide into monstrous progeny. Naked cells, lacking self-respect, do not seem to have any sense of self.

The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth.

It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.

Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else.

Man is embedded in nature.

The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.

Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.