Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.

A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.