One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.

I have no axe to grind; only my thoughts to burnish.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.

Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned