Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.

An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.

It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.

For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.

The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.

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.

I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.