Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.

Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.

Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway

If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

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

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.