Joseph Wood
Joseph Wood
nature mean mind
To those who study her, Nature reveals herself as extraordinarily fertile and ingenious in devising means, but she has no ends which the human mind has been able to discover or comprehend.
gratitude vices kind
Happiness is a kind of gratitude and vice versa.
science men religion
Poetry, mythology, and religion represent the world as man would like to have it, while science represents the world as he gradually comes to discover it.
beauty beautiful flower
Is it wholly fantastic to admit the possibility that Nature herself strove toward what we call beauty? Face to face with any one of the elaborate flowers which man's cultivation has had nothing to do with, it does not seem fantastic to me. We put survival first. But when we have a margin of safety left over, we expend it in the search for the beautiful. Who can say that Nature does not do the same?
self-esteem rare-moments seeing
The rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at, but the moment when we are capable of seeing.
atheism facts can-do
Though many have tried, no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science, which can do so much, cannot decide what it ought to do.
atheism finance can-do
Security depends not so much upon how much you have, as upon how much you can do without.
short-life men anxiety
Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man's existence.
nature adventure men
We have not merely escaped from something but into something... We have joined the greatest of all communities, which is not that of man alone but of everything which shares with us the great adventure of being alive.
ethics bases customs
Custom has furnished the only basis which ethics have ever had.
nature men scarcity
An abundance of some good things is perfectly compatible with the scarcity of others; that life is everywhere precarious, man everywhere small.
spring winter ice
There are some optimists who search eagerly for the skunk cabbage which in February sometimes pushes itself up through the ice, and who call it a sign of spring. I wish that I could feel that way about it, but I do not. The truth of the matter, to me, is simply that skunk cabbage blooms in the winter time.
mars way ancient
The impulse to mar and to destroy is as ancient and almost as nearly universal as the impulse to create. The one is an easier way than the other of demonstrating power.
drama character greatness
True tragedy may be defined as a dramatic work in which the outward failure of the principal personage is compensated for by the dignity and greatness of his character.