I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him unintelligent. He was annoyed, and it did not appease him when I went on to ask how he came to attach such a clear meaning to the notion of lack of intelligence. We never spoke again.

The case I shall find evidence for is that when literature arrives, it expels science.

The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by accident (though there is a great deal of it) to have contributed anything of permanent value to the storehouse of human thought.

It is a truism to say that a good experiment is precisely that which spares us the exertion of thinking: the better it is, the less we have to worry about its interpretation, about what it really means.

Heredity proposes and development disposes.

Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.

[A certain class of explanations in science are] analgesics that dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause.