“The thinking man must oppose all cruelties no matter how deeply rooted in tradition or surrounded by a halo.”

“What we call love is in its essence reverence for life.”

“Today it is considered as exaggeration to proclaim constant respect for every form of life as being the serious demand of a rational ethic. But the time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics is in its unqualified form extended responsibility to everything that has life.”

“The destiny of man is to be more and more human.”

“I have given up the ambition to be a great scholar. I want to be more- simply a human. . . . We are not true humans, but beings who live by a civilization inherited from the past, that keeps us hostage, that confines us. No freedom of movement. Nothing. Everything in us is killed by our calculations for our future, by our social position and cast. You see, I am not happy-yet I am happy. I suffer, but that is part of life. I live, I don't care about my existence, and that is the beginning of wisdom.”

“O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!”

“I suppose an entire cabinet of shells would be an expression of the whole human mind; a Flora of the whole globe would be so likewise, or a history of beasts; or a painting of all the aspects of the clouds. Everything is significant.”

“For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.”