The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.

You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs.

Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.

The preternatural solemnity of a good many of the professionally religious is to me a point against them.

The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.