Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man's the workman in it.

It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period.

The universe is not a machine after all but something more like a mind. It is more like a thought made flesh than like a machine made of matter.

We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.

The more you own, the more it owns you. We are dying from civilisation and its discontents, and only the most radical knowledge of how to live simply can save us.

The most terrible thing about materialism is not that it assumes the world to be made of atoms, but that it assumes this ideal notion of material atoms to be something particularly scientific, particular real, or particularly philosophic.

The atoms of our bodies are traceable to origins in the distant past; they are made of stardust literally.

The hypothesis that life originates in the inorganic world is the only hypothesis consonant with the present state of scientific knowledge.

The atoms of our bodies are traceable to origins in the distant past; they have formed the cores of stars—gone through many transformations of the universe and of all the transformations of matter in space and time we are their inheritors.