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

A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.

Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.

By "essence" I understand a universal, of any degree of complexity and definition, which may be given immediately, whether to sense or to thought.... This object of pure sense or pure thought, with no belief superadded, an object inwardly complete and individual, but without external relations or physical status, is what I call an essence.

The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.

All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.

Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.