"I am a futility. The life of prayer begins with that. And God is not a comfort, to be offered like Kleenex. God is a poisoned sea, with broken syringes washing up on the beach. God is shopping malls stretching to the horizon and warplanes in the sky. God is a flat tire in a rainstorm and beer cans in the ditch, a bottle shattered on a highway and the taste of gunmetal in your mouth."

“Our galaxy is 10 billion years old. The Earth is only 4.5 billion years old. We are a firefly flicker in the great astrobiology of the galaxy.”

Source : "Hunting for the Great Galactic Internet". Interview with Slate, www.slate.com. April 8, 2012.

“The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature.”

“It's all right if your automobile goes wrong while you are driving it. You can get out in the road and tinker with it. But if your airplane breaks down, you can't sit on a convenient cloud and tinker with that!”

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”

“Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. And don't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines.”

Source : Quoted in Deirdre Mullane, Words to Make My Dream Children Live: A Book of African American Quotations (1995)

“AIDS is our number one enemy. This enemy can be defeated. While the research for a cure continues, four principles -- love, support, acceptance and care for those affected -- can make us winners.”

“And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene,The leafy mind, that long was tightly furled,Will turn its private substance into green,And young shoots spread upon our inner world.”

Source : Theodore Roethke (2011). “The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke”, p.28, Anchor

“Don't live the same year seventy-five times and call it a life.”