The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.

Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

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.

All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.

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