Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular.... Every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and the bias which that revelation gives to life.

Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.

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.

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

Fear first created the gods.

Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.

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.