Quotes by writer

"We are all youthful barbarians, and only our new toys bring us excitement. That has been the sole purpose of our flights. This one flies higher, that one faster. But now we will make ourselves at home. We will forget the machine, the tool. It is no longer complex; it does what it is supposed to do, unnoticed. And through this tool we will find again the old nature, the nature of the gardener, the navigator, the poet."

"But the conceited man did not hear him. Conceited people never hear anything but praise."

"I know a planet where there is a certain red-faced gentleman. He has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved any one. He has never done anything in his life but add up figures. And all day he says over and over, just like you: 'I am busy with matters of consequence!' And that makes him swell up with pride. But he is not a man - he is a mushroom!"

"What do we mean by setting a man free? You cannot free a man who dwells in a desert and is an unfeeling brute."

"Mad is the man who is forever gritting his teeth against that granite block, complete and changeless, of the past."

"Man's progress is but a gradual discovery that his questions have no meaning."

"To be a man is to feel that one's own stone contributes to building the edifice of the world."

"Vain is the hope of finding pleasure in that which one has hitherto disdained; as when the warrior hopes to find pleasure in the joys of the sedentaries."

"Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the asronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning."

"I shall never again admire a merely brave man."