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

The freedom to create is somehow linked with facility of access to those obscure regions below the conscious mind.

Certainly science has moved forward. But when science progresses, it often opens vaster mysteries to our gaze. Moreover, science frequently discovers that it must abandon or modify what it once believed. Sometimes it ends by accepting what it has previously scorned.

I once saw, on a flower pot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to build a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since I have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a nonexistent tree I think I am entitled to speak for the field mouse.

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

You think that way as you begin to get grayer and you see pretty plainly that the game is not going to end as you planned.

Great minds have always seen it. That is why man has survived his journey this long. When we fail to wish any longer to be otherwise than what we are, we will have ceased to evolve. Evolution has to be lived forward. I say this as one who has stood above the bones of much that has vanished, and at midnight has examined his own face.