Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.

If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.

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.

why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.

To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.

Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.

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.