It's just plain learning something that you didn't know. There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded.

I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant.

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

The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything. To be sure, it is hidden away in bone and conducts internal affairs in secrecy, but virtually all the business is the direct result of thinking that has already occurred in other minds.

I cannot think of a single field in biology or medicine in which we can claim genuine understanding, and it seems to me the more we learn about living creatures, especially ourselves, the stranger life becomes.

Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions.

As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so young, we can be excused all sorts of folly and can permit ourselves the hope that someday, as a species, we will begin to grow up.