 It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig. |
| All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible. |
| Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality. |
| If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved. |
| The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings. |
| Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit. |
| Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character. |
| Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace. |
| A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world. |
| Habit is stronger than reason. |
| History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. |
| The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool. |
| The Bible is literature, not dogma. |
| The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity. |
| Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body. |
| My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests. |
| Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. |
| There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far. |
| The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape. |
| The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it. |
