“Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy”

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettie...”

“Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.”

“This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”

“I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.”

“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

“Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.”

“No one disputes that seeming order can come out of the application of simple rules. But who wrote the rules?”

“How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so much art, and for what ends were their several parts?Was the eye contrived without skill in Opticks, and the ear without knowledge of sounds?....”

“[T]he scripture worshippers put the writings ahead of God. Instead of interpreting God's actions in nature, for example, they interpret nature in the light of the Scripture. Nature says the rock is...”

“That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.”

“Humans are a terrestrial species biased toward attributing the forces we see around us to familiar forces on land. But the more we look, the more we learn that everything arises from the sea and ev...”

“This beach I voyage on leads me through the earth's immortal consistencies. Each form I encounter obeys the principles of perfection and trial, a timelessness in the making. The proportions of trut...”

“That is the normal succession of things in this part of the world; you can see the various stages all over Scratch Flat. There is, for example, a small red maple swamp above my house on the northwe...”