I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.

It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.

I am confident of my ability to demonstrate that one can sometimes believe in something and yet not believe in it. Nothing is less fathomable than the systems that motivate our actions.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

You believe I run after the strange because I do not know the beautiful; no, it is because you do not know the beautiful that I seek the strange.