It is surely one of the curious paradoxes of history that science which professionally has little to do with faith, owes its origins to an act of faith that the universe can be rationally interpreted, and that science today is sustained by that assumption.

Each man deciphers from the ancient alphabets of nature only those secrets that his own deeps possess the power to endow with meaning.

As we passed under a streetlamp I noticed, beside my own bobbing shadow, another great, leaping grotesquerie that had an uncanny suggestion of the frog world about it . . . judging from the shadow, it was soaring higher and more gaily than myself. 'Very well,' you will say, 'Why didn’t you turn around. That would be the scientific thing to do.' But let me tell you it is not done ― not on an empty road at midnight.

This is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is . . . the supreme epitome of the reaching out.

We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no perfect image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time.

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

It is a funny thing what the brain will do with memories and how it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted to make a design, or get some meaning out of them, whether you want it or not, or even see it.