Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

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.

Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.