It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.

When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.

To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.

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

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.