There is nothing very 'normal' about nature.

Of all the unexpected qualities of an unexpected universe, the sheer organizing power of animal and plant metabolism is one of the most remarkable. . . . Where it reaches its highest development, in the human mind, we forget it completely. . . . So important does nature regard this unseen combustion . . . that a starving man's brain will be protected to the last while his body is steadily consumed.

Fire, as we have learned to our cost, has an insatiable hunger to be fed. It is a nonliving force that can even locomote itself.

Man is always marveling at what he has blown apart, never at what the universe has put together, and this is his limitation.

Man is dragged hither and thither, at one moment by the blind instincts of the forest, at the next by the strange intuitions of a higher self whose rationale he doubts and does not understand.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave him birth, will respond.