Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.
He hoped these students would learn how to be at home in the desert, not how to conquer it; and he hoped that, in the process, they might discover the spiritual value of quietude.
This form of interspecies leap is common, not rare; about 60 percent of all human infectious diseases currently known either cross routinely or have recently crossed between other animals and us.
By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.
Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.
Identity is such a crucial affair that one shouldn’t rush into it.
Nor are we the culmination of evolution, except in the sense that there has never been another species so bizarrely ingenious that it could create both iambic pentameter and plutonium.