Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.

The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.

Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedism, extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like Buddhism, it had looked only for peace and the liberation of souls. It looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God... Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with anesthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire.

Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.

A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel.

Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?