There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.

Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.

For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.

The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.

One real world is enough.

A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel.

A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.