I no longer cared about survival - I merely loved.
Man would not be man if his dreams did not exceed his grasp. ... Like John Donne, man lies in a close prison, yet it is dear to him. Like Donne's, his thoughts at times overleap the sun and pace beyond the body. If I term humanity a slime mold organism it is because our present environment suggest it. If I remember the sunflower forest it is because from its hidden reaches man arose. The green world is his sacred center. In moments of sanity he must still seek refuge there. ... If I dream by contrast of the eventual drift of the star voyagers through the dilated time of the universe, it is because I have seen thistledown off to new worlds and am at heart a voyager who, in this modern time, still yearns for the lost country of his birth.
Perhaps a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow alienated from his world, his fellows, and the objects around him. He suffers from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy upon earth except as it is to be found in the enlightenment of the spirit--some ability to have a perceptive rather than an exploitive relationship with his fellow creatures.
When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave us birth, will respond.
God knows how many things a man misses by becoming smug and assuming that matters will take their own course.
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.
Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.
It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.
Man is always marveling at what he has blown apart, never at what the universe has put together, and this is his limitation.
Tomorrow lurks in us, the latency to be all that was not achieved before.
One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.
Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us.
