Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

Infinites, when considered absolutely without any restriction or limitation, are neither equal nor unequal, nor have any certain proportion one to another, and therefore, the principle that all infinites are equal is a precarious one.

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

Contention existed before the earth was formed.

The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you – black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

Nature abhors annihilation.

A man’s felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

Is science of any value? I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the power is a value.

Will and intellect are one and the same thing.

We’re a blip in the existence of the universe, and we’re constantly trying to pull each other down. Not doing things to help each other.

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.

Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.

I went on all over the States, ranting poems to enthusiastic audiences that, the week before, had been equally enthusiastic about lectures on Railway Development or the Modern Turkish Essay.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

In judging of a beautiful statue, the aesthetic faculty is absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are powerless to help us.

Creationists make it sound as though a ‚theory‘ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

I was definitely very much a country boy.

We see the world not as it is, but as we are.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God’s final word on where your lips end.

There could be shadow galaxies, shadow stars, and even shadow people.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I’m more at home in the vacant lots.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

I don’t mind making jokes, but I don’t want to look like one.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

Men exist for the sake of one another.

In this business you have to develop a thick skin, but I’m always going to feel everything. It’s my nature.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.

You just have to have a simple faith.

I was born on January 8, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. I estimate, however, that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day. I don’t know whether any of them was later interested in astronomy.

The American doctor, in my opinion, possesses a combination of conservatism and that other quality which has put the United States in the forefront in almost every department of science – that is, an eagerness to know what it is really all about in order that he may not be the one left behind if there is something to it.

Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?

A women who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

I happen to believe there is evil in the world.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?