What the Church should be telling him [the carpenter] is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.

We've got to laugh or break our hearts in this damnable world.

To start with invention is the mark of the fertile mind ... and leads later to the interpretation of experience; to start with the reproduction of experience is the infallible index of a barren invention.

And heresy is, as I have tried to show, largely the expression of opinion of the untutored average man, trying to grapple with the problems of the universe at the point where they begin to interfere with his daily life and thought.

There is one vast human experience that confronts us so formidably that we cannot pretend to overlook it. There is no solution to death. There is no means whatever whereby you or I, by taking thought, can solve this difficulty in such a manner that it no longer exists.

He was being about as protective as a can-opener.

What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.