Great Throughts Treasury

"The journey is difficult, immerse. 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 know."

"I no longer cared about survival - I merely loved."

"Modern man lives increasingly in the future and neglects the present. A people who seek to do this have an insatiable demand for soothsayers and oracles to assure and comfort them about the insubstantial road they tread."

"Directly stated, the evolution of the entire universe - stars, elements, life, man - is a process of drawing something out of nothing, out of the utter void of nonbeing. The creative element in the mind of man - the latency which can conceive gods, carve statues, move the heart with the symbols of great poetry, or devise the formulas of modern physics - emerge in as mysterious a fashion as those elementary particles which leap into momentary existence in great cyclotrons, only to vanish again like infinitesimal ghosts."

"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 departure."

"In the end, science as we know it has two basic types of practitioners. One is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it hides in a snails eye or within the light that impinges on that delicate organ. The second kind of observer is the extreme reductionist who is so busy stripping things apart that the tremendous mystery has been reduced to a trifle, to intangibles not worth troubling one’s head about."

"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."

"No civilization professes openly to be unable to declare its destination. In an age like our own, however, there comes a time when individuals in increasing numbers unconsciously seek direction and taste despair."

"The teacher is a sculptor of the intangible future. There is no more dangerous occupation on the planet, for what we conceive as our masterpiece may appear out of time to mock us - a horrible caricature of ourselves... We, too, like the generation before us, are the cracked, the battered, the malformed products of remoter chisels shaping the most obstinate substance in the universe; the substance of man."

"The teacher is often the first to discover the talented and unusual scholar. How he handles and encourages, or discourages, such a child may make all the difference in the world to that child's future - and to the world."

"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 being that instant gone."

"A great white wolf howled until her ululations echoed against the stars. She waited, but there was no response from the ravine, from thicket, from the far-off mountains. Her mate tried in his turn to break the silence and intuitively to awake the pack. There was still silence for the simple reason there was no pack to answer. There could have been no answer below the arctic. They could not know but a vast loneliness had begun to descend upon them ? the loneliness of a dying species. The Ice Age had ended. No, not quite, for the white cub with the big feet toddled on beside his mother. When she slept, he would sleep. He would never know he was a floating ghost from the past. Only the shadows and the moonlight knew and embraced him, knew they would do so to the end."

"A world like that is not really natural, or (the thought strikes one later) perhaps it really is, only more so. Parts of it are neither land nor sea and so everything is moving from one element to another, wearing uneasily the queer transitional bodies that life adopts in such places. Fish, some of them, come out and breathe air and sit about watching you. Plants take to eating insects, mammals go back to the water and grow elongate like fish, crabs climb trees. Nothing stays put where it began because everything is constantly climbing in, or climbing out, of its unstable environment."

"Above all, some of them, a mere handful in any generation perhaps, loved ? they loved the animals about them, the song of the wind, the soft voices of women. On the flat surfaces of cave walls the three dimensions of the outside world took animal shape and form. Here ? not with the ax, not with the bow ? man fumbled at the door of his true kingdom. Here, hidden in times of trouble behind silent brows, against the man with the flint, waited St. Francis of the birds ? the lovers, the men who are still forced to walk warily among their kind.."

"A love for Earth, almost forgotten in man's roving mind, had momentarily reasserted its mastery, a love for the green meadows we have so long taken for granted and desecrated to our cost. Man was born and took shape among Earth's leafy shadows. The most poignant thing the astronauts had revealed in their extremity was the nostalgic call still faintly ringing on the winds from the sunflower forest. [on Apollo 13]"

"A society whose youth believe only in the Now is deceiving itself: A now that is truly Now has no future. It denies Man's basic and oldest characteristic, that he is a creation of memory, a bridge into the future, a time binder. Without that recognition of continuity, love and understanding between the generations is impossible. A true Now standing all by itself is the face of Death."

"Ah, my mind takes up, on the other hand the machine does not bleed, ache, hang for hours in the empty sky in a torment of hope to learn the fate of another machine, nor does it cry out with joy nor dance in the air with the fierce passion of a bird. Far off, over a distance greater than space, that remote cry from the heart of heaven makes a faint buzzing sound among my breakfast dishes and passes on and away."

"All else gives way before the technician and the computer specialist running his estimates as to how many deaths it takes, and in how many minutes, before the surviving fragment of a nation ? if any ? sues for peace. Nor, in the scores of books analyzing these facts, is it easy to find a word spared to indicate concern for the falling sparrow, the ruined forest, the contaminated spring ? all, in short, that still spells to man a life in nature.""

"Already he [humanity] is physically antique in this robot world he has created. All that sustains him is that small globe of grey matter through which spin his ever-changing conceptions of the universe."

"And there was no longer a single race who bred blindly and without question. Time and its agonizing nostalgia would touch the heart each season, and be seen in the fall of a leaf, or, most terrible of all, a loved face would grow old. Cronos and the Fates had entered man's thinking, and try to escape as he might, he would endure an interior Ice Age. He would make, and then unmake fables. Then at last, and unwillingly, comprehend an intangible abstraction called space-time, and shiver inwardly at the endless abysses of space as he had once shivered, unclothed and unlighted before the Earthly frost."

"As for men, those myriad little detached ponds with their own swarming corpuscular life, what were they but a way that water has of going about beyond the reach of rivers?"

"As our knowledge of the genetic mechanism increases, ours ears are bombarded with ingenious accounts of how we are to control, henceforth, our own evolution. We who have recourse only to a past which we misread and which has made us cynics would now venture to produce our own future. Again I judge this self-esteem as a symptom of our time, our powerful misused technology, our desire not to seek the good life but to produce a painless mechanical version of it -- our willingness to be good if goodness can, in short, be swallowed in a pill."

"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, it was soaring higher and more gaily than myself. 'Very well,' you will say, 'Why didn?t you turn around. That would be the scientific thing to do.' But let me tell you it is not done ? not on an empty road at midnight."

"Beginning on some winter night the snow will fall steadily for a thousand years and hush in its falling the spore cities whose seed has flown. The delicate traceries of the frost will slowly dim the glass in observatories and all will be as it had been before the virus wakened. The long trail of Halley's comet, once more returning will pass like a ghostly matchflame over the unwatched grave of the cities. This has always been their end, whether in the snow or in the sand."

"But I have pondered and not understood earth that endures spoiled cities in preference to white deserts and stars."

"But there is every reason to think that the bulging cortex which would later measure stars and ice ages was still a dim, impoverished region in a skull box whose capacity was no greater than that of great apes."

"Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe, are made far backward in the innocence of childhood."

"Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man."

"Each and all, we are riding into the dark. Even living, we cannot remember half the events of our own days."

"Every man contains within himself a ghost continent."

"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"

"Fire, as we have learned to our cost, has an insatiable hunger to be fed. It is a nonliving force that can even locomote itself."

"For if inventions of power outrun understanding, as they now threaten to do, man may well sink into a night more abysmal than any he has yet experienced."

"For just a moment I held the universe at bay by the simple expedient of sitting on my haunches before a fox den and tumbling about with a chicken bone. It is the gravest, most meaningful act I shall ever accomplish, but, as Thoreau once remarked of some peculiar errand of his own, there is no use reporting it to the Royal Society."

"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. Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the chill waters, that he had before him an immense journey. Perhaps that same foreboding still troubles the hearts of those who walk out of a crowded room and stare with relief into the abyss of space so long as there is a star to be seen twinkling across those miles of emptiness."

"Fox masks, wolf masks, I try them on."

"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."

"Great minds have always seen it. That is why man has survived his journey this long. When we fail to wish any longer to be otherwise than what we are, we will have ceased to evolve. Evolution has to be lived forward. I say this as one who has stood above the bones of much that has vanished, and at midnight has examined his own face."

"I am a man who regrets the loss of his fur and his tail."

"I am every man and no man, and will be so to the end. This is why I must tell the story as I may. Not for the nameless name upon the page, not for the trails behind me that faded or led nowhere, not for the rooms at nightfall where I slept from exhaustion or did not sleep at all, not for the confusion of where I was to go, or if I had a destiny recognizable by any star. No, in retrospect it was the loneliness of not knowing, not knowing at all."

"I am middle-aged now, and like the Egyptian heads of buried stone, or like the gentle ones who came before me, I am resigned to wait out man's lingering barbarity."

"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."

"I am older now, and sleep less, and have seen most of what there is to see and am not very much impressed any more, I suppose, by anything."

"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."

"I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows."

"I have never entered a wood but what I hear footsteps in the leaves tiptoeing away."

"I love forms beyond my own, and regret the borders between us."

"I mean to reflect on the life that is here and about In the fall of the leaves -- not on the dying leaf."

"I once saw, on a flower pot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to build a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since I have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a nonexistent tree I think I am entitled to speak for the field mouse."