My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.

People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts...The name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like "France" or "England," to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong.

At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men.

I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am, unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied ... In spite of everything I survive.