The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

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.

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.

I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.