Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. 

Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to meter. 

The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication of truth; 

the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.

No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking.

We see only what we know.

Myth must be kept alive. 

The people who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. 

The function of the artist is the mythologisation of the environment and the world.

Here we are, 

trapped in the amber of the moment. 

There is no why.

Let us celebrate the occasion with wine and sweet words.

An understanding of the natural world 

and what's in it 

is a source of not only a great curiosity 

but great fulfillment.

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, 

and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: 

Our life is the creation of our mind.

A multitude of words is no proof of a prudent mind.

We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value 

that we forget that the inner value, 

the rapture that is associated with being alive, 

is what it's all about.

I would say that all our sciences are the material that has to be mythologised. 

A mythology gives spiritual import — 

what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, 

of the world of nature round about us, 

as understood today.

I never felt magic crazy as this

I never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea

I never held emotion in the palm of my hand

Or felt sweet breezes in the top of a tree

But now you’re here

Brighten my northern sky

A day without laughter is a day wasted.

Man is most nearly himself 

when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

Everything existing in the universe 

is the fruit of chance and necessity.

Doing what little one can 

to increase the general stock of knowledge 

is as respectable an object of life, 

as one can in any likelihood pursue.

Hold to the now, 

the here, 

through which all future plunges to the past.

Trust the work 

not the author.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves. 

It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.

We are shaped by our thoughts; 

we become what we think.

There is grandeur in this view of life.

Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, 

to match your nature with Nature.

Evolution has no long-term goal. 

There is no long-distance target, 

no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, 

although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion 

that our species is the final goal of evolution.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, 

nor the most intelligent that survives. 

It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

The universe begins to look 

more like a great thought 

than a great machine.

As great scientists have said and as all children know, 

it is above all by the imagination 

that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

The strongest arguments prove nothing 

so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience. 

Experimental science is the queen of sciences 

and the goal of all speculation.

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.

Ignorance is the night of the mind, 

but a night without moon and star.

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, 

and great things in that which is small.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, 

proceeds then to the understanding, 

and ends with reason. 

There is nothing higher than reason.

Logic can often be reversed, 

but the effect does not precede the cause.

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Second thoughts are ever wiser.

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

The key to the Grail is compassion, 

suffering with, feeling another’s sorrow 

as if it were your own.

The one who finds the dynamo of compassion 

is the one who’s found the Grail.

Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; 

it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves.

Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself it’s own solution. 

It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.

Art is not, like science, a logic of references 

but a release from references and rendition of immediate experience: 

a presentation of forms, images, or ideas 

in such a way that they will communicate, 

not primarily a thought or even a feeling, but an impact.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? 

Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

It is not once nor twice but times without number 

that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.

Full circle, 

from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, 

we come: 

an ambiguous enigmatic incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us, 

like the substance of a dream.

The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation. 

When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, 

then comes the new life and all that is needed.

The unfolding through time of all things from one 

is the simple message, finally, 

of every one of the creation myths ... 

including that of our contemporary biological view, 

which becomes an effective mythic image 

the moment we recognise its own inner mystery.

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,

on the surface of a gas covered planet

going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away

and think this to be normal

is obviously some indication

of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

A man of genius makes no mistakes; 

his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

Myth is much more important and true than history. 

History is just journalism 

and you know how reliable that is.

Intellectual growth should commence at birth 

and cease only at death.