Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.

Sanity is madness put to good use.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very properly hangs about it, since it is the immovable standard and silent witness of all our memories and assertions; and the past and the future, which in our anxious life are so differently interesting and so differently dark, are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like the sun.

There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.