Be it whim or emergency, the modern laboratory is equally at the service of romance, equally ready to gratify mankind with a torpedo or a toy.

All myths that are something more than fancies gain rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions of human experience.

All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each religion has its own book of martyrs.

It is the fine excesses of life that make it worth living.

The beauty we love is very silent. It smiles softly to itself, but never speaks.

We have, of course, long since ceased to think of Nature as the sympathetic mirror of our moods, or to imagine that she has any concern with the temporal affairs of man.

Wild oats will get sown some time, and one of the arts of life is to sow them at the right time.

It is curious how, from time immemorial, man seems to have associated the idea of evil with beauty, shrunk from it with a sort of ghostly fear, while, at the same time drawn to it by force of its hypnotic attraction.

Modern science, then, so far from being an enemy of romance, is seen on every hand to be its sympathetic and resourceful friend, its swift and irresistible helper in its serious need, and an indulgent minister to its lighter fancies.

If Romeo and Juliet make a tragedy of it nowadays, they have only to blame their own mismanagement, for the world is with them as it has never been before, and all sensible fathers and mothers know it.

Though actually the work of man's hands - or, more properly speaking, the work of his travelling feet, - roads have long since come to seem so much a part of Nature that we have grown to think of them as a feature of the landscape no less natural than rocks and trees.

A wholesome oblivion of one's neighbours is the beginning of wisdom.

Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the difference between them.

We are all treading the vanishing road of a song in the air, the vanishing road of the spring flowers and the winter snows, the vanishing roads of the winds and the streams, the vanishing road of beloved faces.

We also maintain - again with perfect truth - that mystery is more than half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination.

A woman's beauty is one of her great missions.

Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its melancholy; for the ultimate fact of which that melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off.

More and more the world is growing to love a lover, and one has only to read the newspapers to see how sympathetic are the times to any generous and adventurous display of the passions.

Be it whim or emergency, the modern laboratory is equally at the service of romance, equally ready to gratify mankind with a torpedo or a toy.

On the contrary, woman is the best equipped fighting machine that ever went to battle.

The spiritual element, the really important part of religion, has no concern with Time and Space, temporary mundane laws, or conduct.

In their work, then, as in their play, men and women are more and more coming to share with each other as comrades, and really the fun of life seems in no wise diminished as a consequence.

Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder's than any other agency in the world.

Races and nations are thus ever ready to believe the worst of one another.

There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy of goodness and greatness and things of good report.

All roads indeed lead to Rome, but theirs also is a more mystical destination, some bourne of which no traveller knows the name, some city, they all seem to hint, even more eternal.

Nature is forever arriving and forever departing, forever approaching, forever vanishing; but in her vanishings there seems to be ever the waving of a hand, in all her partings a promise of meetings farther along the road.

The road recedes as the traveler advances, leaving a continuous present.

Boredom is... a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

Boldness and decision command, often even in evil, the respect and concurrence of mankind.

The proper study of mankind is books.

The creation of Physics is the shared heritage of all mankind. East and West, North and South have equally participated in it.

Our true nationality is mankind.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

We leave as we came and, god willing, as we shall return, with peace, and hope for all mankind.

We need to teach the next generation of children from day one that they are responsible for their lives. Mankind's greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

Through all of history mankind has ingested psychedelic substances. Those substances exist to put you in touch with spirits beyond yourself, with the creator, with the creative impulse of the planet.

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

I address myself to the Communists, to those Communists who were prompted to join the Party by the progressive ideas of mankind and socialism, and not by selfish personal interests - let us represent our pure and just ideas by pure and just means.

I think we're entering a very dangerous time. The West has set itself up, decided it's in charge, not for good intentions, not for the benefit of mankind.

In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2,000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods.

You may count on Mexico's support, since your commitment to the noblest causes of mankind and your vast experience are and will be invaluable in enabling us, together, to achieve a better world.

Our ideal is to make her ever stronger and better and finer, because in that way alone, as we believe, can she be of the greatest service to the world's peace and to the welfare of mankind.

Only when every one of us and every nation learns the secret of love for all mankind will the world become a great orchestra, following the beat of the Greatest Conductor of all.

Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.

A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.