E. B. White on nature

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.

Advice to young writers who want to get ahead without annoying delays: don’t write about Man, write about ‘a’ man.

Every day, man is making bigger and better fool-proof things, and every day, nature is making bigger and better fools. So far, I think nature is winning.

Albert Einstein1879–1955

Nature does nothing uselessly.

Aristotle384–322 BCPolitics, Book I, 1253a.8

Nature scarcely ever gives us the very best; for that we must have recourse to art.

Baltasar Gracián1601–1658

• Art