If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our...

Black magic, the magic of the primeval chaos, blots out or transmogrifies the true form of things. At the stroke of twelve the princess must flee the banquet or risk discovery in the rags of...

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.

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

At the core of the universe, the face of God wears a smile

From the solitude of the wood, [Man] has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart.

God knows how many things a man misses by becoming smug and assuming that matters will take their own course.

The evolutionists, piercing beneath the show of momentary stability, discovered, hidden in rudimentary organs, the discarded rubbish of the past. They detected the reptile under the lifted feathers of the bird, the lost terrestrial limbs...

It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes. This is the final paradox, which men call evolution.

The creative element in the mind of man . . . emerges in as mysterious a fashion as those elementary particles which leap into momentary existence in great cyclotrons, only to vanish again like infinitesimal...

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...

One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.

Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work.One day,...

When the human mind exists in the light of reason and no more than reason, we may say with absolute certainty that Man and all that made him will be in that instant gone.

Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the waters, that he had before him an immense journey.

I am not nearly so interested in what monkey man was derived from as I am in what kind of monkey he is to become.

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...

Life may exist in yonder dark, but it will not wear the shape of man

If ‘dead’ matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialists that the matter of which he speaks contains...

One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.

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...

It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and love for a time in the wilderness.

To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore.

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...

Out of the choked Devonian waters emerged sight and sound and the music that rolls invisible through the composer’s brain. They are there still in the ooze along the tideline, though no one notices. The...

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...

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,...

Many of us who walk to and fro upon our usual tasks are prisoners drawing mental maps of escape

For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.

Lights come and go in the night sky. Men, troubled at last by the things they build, may toss in their sleep and dream bad dreams, or lie awake while the meteors whisper greenly overhead....

The journey is difficult, immense. We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn all that we hunger to...

Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us.

Though men in the mass forget the origins of their need, they still bring wolfhounds into city apartments, where dog and man both sit brooding in wistful discomfort.The magic that gleams an instant between Argos...

The venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever-growing universe within, to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies our telescopes follow from without.

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

Tomorrow lurks in us, the latency to be all that was not achieved before.

I am sure now that life is not what it is purported to be and that nature, in the canny words of the Scotch theologue, ‘is not as natural as it looks.

He was becoming something the world had never seen before – a dream animal – living at least partially within a secret universe of his own creation and sharing that secret universe in his head...

One [practitioner of science] is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it hides in a snail’s eye or within the light that impinges on that...