31 quotes
The time to hear bird music is between four and six in the morning. Seven o’clock is not too late, but by eight the fine rapture is over, due, I suspect, to the contentment of the inner man that comes with breakfast; a poet should always be hungry or have a lost love.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
Life is a phenomenon, sui generis, a primal fact in its own right, like energy. Cut flesh or wood how you like, hack at them in a baffled fury — you cannot find life itself, you can only see what it built out of the lifeless dust.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
There are always some of us, not a few, in every generation, who go over wholly to the green flag. It is such a passionless fealty, so reticent a love, that neither do trumpets sound for it nor quarrels arise from it. Only, you will find that those who have pledged allegiance are happy about it in quiet.
Flowering Earth (1939)
The beauty of a butterfly’s wing, the beauty of all things, is not a slave to purpose, a drudge sold to futurity. It is excrescence, superabundance, random ebullience, and sheer delightful waste to be enjoyed in its own high right.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
The harvest moon has no innocence, like the slim quarter moon of a spring twilight, nor has it the silver penny brilliance of the moon that looks down upon the resorts of summertime. Wise, ripe, and portly, like an old Bacchus, it waxes night after night.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
The more anyone knows about the two kingdoms, animate and vegetating, the less he perceives any boundary between them, until finally he comes to deny the existence of that boundary. Holding the passport of investigation which is stamped with the one great seal of life itself, a biologist travels unchallenged from one realm to the other.
Flowering Earth (1939)
I have often started off on a walk in the state called mad — mad in the sense of sore-headed, or mad with tedium or confusion; I have set forth dull, null and even thoroughly discouraged. But I never came back in such a frame of mind, and I never met a human being whose humor was not the better for a walk.
In Thomas Henry Huxley Darwinism had a champion in invincible armor. For sheer glitter his mind has seldom had an equal in any land or age and he laid waste about him with the weapon of truth. “The cradle of every science,” he chuckled, “is surrounded by dead theologians as that of Hercules was with strangled serpents.”
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
Of our windows on the universe, science is set with the clearest pane; it is not warped or waved to make the images appear to support any dogma; the glass is not rose-tinted, neither is it leaded with a picture that shuts out the sun and, coming between the light of day and you, enforces the credence of the past upon the young present.
Flowering Earth (1939)
A thing is either alive or it isn't; there is nothing that is almost alive. There is but the remotest possibility of the origin of life by spontaneous generation, and every likelihood that Arrhenius is right when he dares to claim that life is a cosmic phenomenon, something that drifts between the spheres, like light, and like light transiently descends upon those fit to receive it.
An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
Weighted in their armor of cellulose, the higher land plants, it is true, have taken up fixed stations in life. So they have rather surrendered to the animal kingdom the proverbially broadening effects of travel. But they have not lost the power of motion. Like a dancing girl who expresses dance without stirring her feet, they too gesticulate.
Flowering Earth (1939)