All beauties are to be honored, but only one embraced.

The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.

What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.

All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.

When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.

Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.

If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.