Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode - may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.

The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.

In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality....The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.

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

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.