Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.

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

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

Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular.... Every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and the bias which that revelation gives to life.

I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.

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

Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.