This is my father. Try what you can with him! He won't listen to me, because he remembers what a fool I was when I was a baby.

Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life.

It is courage, courage, courage, that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor.

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt.

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

I loathe the mess of mean superstitions and misunderstood prophecies which is still rammed down the throats of children under the name of Christianity.