"Flower in the Crannied Wall" (1869)
Context: Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower — but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 11
Source: The Story of San Michele (1929), Ch. VII
“If all I cared about was me, I could make a million. And that's what they will never understand.”
Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)
“God is a hypothesis constructed by man to help him understand what existence is all about.”
The New Divinity (1964)
Context: God is a hypothesis constructed by man to help him understand what existence is all about.... To say that God is ultimate reality is just semantic cheating, as well as being so vague as to become effectively meaningless... Today the god hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable, has lost its explanatory value and is becoming an intellectual and moral burden to our thought. It no longer convinces or comforts, and its abandonment often brings a deep sense of relief. Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct some thing to take its place.
Source: On Aggression (1963), Ch. XII : On the Virtue of Scientific Humility
Context: We are the highest achievement reached so far by the great constructors of evolution. We are their "latest" but certainly not their last word. The scientist must not regard anything as absolute, not even the laws of pure reason. He must remain aware of the great fact, discovered by Heraclitus, that nothing whatever really remains the same even for one moment, but that everything is perpetually changing. To regard man, the most ephemeral and rapidly evolving of all species, as the final and unsurpassable achievement of creation, especially at his present-day particularly dangerous and disagreeable stage of development, is certainly the most arrogant and dangerous of all untenable doctrines. If I thought of man as the final image of God, I should not know what to think of God. But when I consider that our ancestors, at a time fairly recent in relation to the earth's history, were perfectly ordinary apes, closely related to chimpanzees, I see a glimmer of hope. It does not require very great optimism to assume that from us human beings something better and higher may evolve. Far from seeing in man the irrevocable and unsurpassable image of God, I assert – more modestly and, I believe, in greater awe of the Creation and its infinite possibilities – that the long-sought missing link between animals and the really humane being is ourselves!
"Disappointment Is the Lot of Women" oration (17 or 18 October 1855) quoted in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Antony, and Mathilda Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1 (1881)
Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 6 (p. 79)
In a television interview, ca. 1980. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi discusses religion http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/retrieve/ResourceMetadata/WGBBMF, National Library of Medicine.
