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.

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.

It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.

The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.