The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and aesthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so.

Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.

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.

A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.

The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.