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

There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.

Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.

The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.

For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.

There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.

Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.