To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.

To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.

Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.