“Emerging from barbarism is a slow process and as man is , geologically speaking, still very young, he has his whole future before him.”

“Do we ever have to abandon all hope? Is it not perhaps a good thing that by refusing to give in to the evidence, the dreams that lie half awake in us all may persist?”

“The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.”

“Among all the occurrences possible in the universe the a priori probability of any particular one of them verges upon zero. Yet the universe exists; particular events must take place in it, the probability of which (before the event) was infinitesimal. At the present time we have no legitimate grounds for either asserting or denying that life got off to but a single start on earth, and that, as a consequence, before it appeared its chances of occurring were next to nil. ... Destiny is written concurrently with the event, not prior to it... The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. Is it surprising that, like the person who has just made a million at the casino, we should feel strange and a little unreal?”

“A man who has never gone to school may steal a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.”

“Everything comes from experience; yet not from actual experience, reiterated by each individual with each generation, but instead from experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species in the course of its evolution.”

“Let others probe the mystery if they can. Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will- The right thing happens to the happy man. The bird flies out, the bird flies back again; The hill becomes the valley, and is still; Let others delve that mystery if they can. God bless the roots! -Body and soul are one The small become the great, the great the small; The right thing happens to the happy man. Child of the dark, he can out leap the sun, His being single, and that being all: The right thing happens to the happy man. Or he sits still, a solid figure when The self-destructive shake the common wall; Takes to himself what mystery he can, And, praising change as the slow night comes on, Wills what he would, surrendering his will Till mystery is no more: No more he can. The right thing happens to the happy man.”